Real Madrid’s Champions League knockout phase play-off tie at Benfica was halted for 10 minutes after Vinicius Junior reported alleged racist abuse and he and his team-mates left the field.<\/p>\n
Referee Francois Letexier made the crossed arms gesture to signal racist abuse following a conversation with Vinicius.<\/p>\n
The Brazil forward had put the Spanish visitors 1-0 up in the second half at the Estadio da Luz, before being booked for an excessive celebration.<\/p>\n
Following an interaction with Benfica’s Gianluca Prestianni, Vinicius ran over to referee Letexier while gesturing towards the opposition player.<\/p>\n
A Real Madrid statement said Vinicius told the referee he had been racially abused by the Argentina winger.<\/p>\n
Vinicius then walked off the pitch and was followed by his Real Madrid team-mates, but play restarted 10 minutes later, in the 60th minute.<\/p>\n
The match was played out to its conclusion, with Real winning 1-0 after 12 minutes of stoppage time, during which an object thrown from the crowd struck Vinicius on the arm.<\/p>\n
After the match, Vinicius released a statement on Instagram condemning the incident.<\/p>\n
“Racists are, above all, cowards. They need to put their shirts in their mouths to show how weak they are,” said Vinicius.<\/p>\n
“But they have the protection of others who, theoretically, have an obligation to punish them. Nothing that happened today is new in my life or in my team’s life.<\/p>\n
“I received a yellow card for celebrating a goal. I still don’t understand why. On the other hand, it was just a poorly executed protocol that served no purpose.”<\/p>\n
Benfica forward Vangelis Pavlidis defended team-mate Prestianni.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think Prestianni said anything like that to Vinicius. I think it has more to do with the heated rivalry between Brazil and Argentina than anything else,” he said.<\/p>\n
Prestianni has yet to respond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Real Madrid’s Champions League knockout phase play-off tie at Benfica was halted for 10 minutes after Vinicius Junior…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-303355","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}