What are the questions that remain unanswered nine years after Anton Ferdinand-John Terry...

[ASFN Admin]

The John Terry racism furore has been reignited by a BBC documentary in which Anton Ferdinand explores his ordeal following the ugly scenes during a Queens Park Rangers match with Chelsea in 2011. Terry’s ambitions bruised by documentary — here was his chance to do the right thing For the first time, Ferdinand describes "how alone I was" within the game after the then Chelsea and England captain was captured on camera saying the words "f------ black c----" at him. Terry, now assistant head coach at Villa, was cleared in court of racist abuse, but subsequently banned for four matches and fined £220,000 following an FA disciplinary hearing. Nine years on, here are some of the unanswered questions prompted by Monday night's programme: Why is there no full account of the FA's interview with Terry? And why did the investigator who questioned him use such an informal interview technique? Just four minutes' worth of scrutiny over Terry's version of events has ever been made public when a small section of his interview was played to magistrates in July 2012. Speaking for the first time on the BBC documentary, Anton Ferdinand said it was "brave of the FA" to pursue charges after a court had found Terry innocent of racist abuse in 2012. However, after listening to the partial recording of a lawyer in charge of investigating the furore, Ferdinad said: "Just hearing that confirms to me that he got treated differently — sharing of the joke says it all for me." Most galling for Ferdinand was the lawyer's seemingly light-hearted reference about the standard of refereeing during a critical point while she interrogated him on his version of events. Terry had told the lawyer: "I'm having an altercation still when I feel as though he said to me 'the black c---'. Now I don't at any point think he's calling me a black c---. I think he's accusing me of calling him a black c--- in the altercation we've had. And then obviously it's, you know in my statement, it's clear to say that I repeat what he said and then call him a "black c---' at the end of that." At this point, the lawyer, who also interviewed Ferdinand, responds: "Okay. Let's just go back a little bit. You come together, you go to the ground. You put your hands in the air, but the ref is not going to give you anything. We won't go into the referee's performance. If you watch the footage you bump into Anton, he shoves you back actually, and then... that's when you're having a bit of verbal there..." Why no recording of Ferdinand's interview? "All I know is that I didn't feel like the victim when I was in the room," says Ferdinand of his interview with the FA. He said he had attempted to obtain his copy of his interview, but the FA had told him "back then" they didn't keep copies of victim interviews. Other witnesses inside the room in 2011 support his claim that he was not made to feel like a victim in the interview. "I knew they wanted to put this to bed straight away because it had caused them an embarrassment," remembers Neil Warnock, the then QPR manager, who attended the interview with Ferdinand. "All the questions — I thought some of the questions were irrelevant, out of order. I said 'is it Anton you are prosecuting here', or something like that." The FA were "naive", he added.

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