Marcus Rashford responds to racist abuse with his usual panache

Marcus Rashford has responded to racist abuse after he missed a penalty in the Euro 2020 final.

A mural of the young star was defaced in his hometown of Withington, Manchester, but it was quickly covered up with messages from supporters.

Rashford tweeted, “The messages I have received today have been positively overwhelming and seeing the response in Withington had me on the verge of tears.

“The communities that always wrapped their arms around me continue to hold me up. I’m Marcus Rashford, 23 years old, black man from Withington and Wythenshawe, South Manchester.

“If I have nothing else, I have that. For all the kind messages, thank you. I’ll be back stronger. We’ll be back stronger.

“I can take critique of my performance all day long, my penalty was not good enough, it should have gone in, but I will never apologise for who I am and where I came from.

“I’ve felt no prouder moment than wearing those three lions on my chest and seeing my family cheer me on in a crowd of tens of thousands,” he added.

Rashford was one of three England players who missed penalties on Sunday night, all of them suffered racist abuse online.

Twitter said there is “no place” for the racist abuse of English players after their loss to Italy in the EURO 2020 finals on July 11.

“The abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter,” a spokesperson said on July 12.

“In the past 24 hours, through a combination of machine learning based automation and human review, we have swiftly removed over 1,000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules – the vast majority of which we detected ourselves proactively using technology.

“We will continue to take action when we identify any Tweets or accounts that violate our policies.

“We have proactively engaged and continue to collaborate with our partners across the football community to identify ways to tackle this issue collectively and will continue to play our part in curbing this unacceptable behaviour – both online and offline,” Twitter added.

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