Patrick Vieira urges his players to “ignore” social media abuse after Andersen incident

BY ANDREW MCSTEEN

Crystal Palace manager Patrick Vieira has urged his players to ignore abuse on social media after Eagles defender Joachim Andersen received death threats on his Instagram account following the 1-1 draw with Liverpool on Monday night.

Andersen revealed he had received “3-400 abusive messages” after the draw in the north west following Liverpool’s Darwin Nunez direct red card after he headbutted the Danish centre-back in the 57th minute at Anfield.

The BBC reported Andersen had reported the messages to the police via Palace’s police liaison officers and has received support from both the club and the Premier League, while Meta, the owners of Instagram and Facebook, had been in contact too.

“He’s okay of course,” said Vieira about Andersen. “He had a really good game against Liverpool [and] all this kind of abuse [and] messages he received are not nice at all. This is something that we don’t want to see, that we don’t want to hear about.

“We have to deal with it because it’s easy to make those kinds of comments on social media.”

“I was happy at that time [I was playing] there was no social media,” added the Palace boss. “This is something that modern players have to deal with.

“The best way is to ignore these kind of messages because you don’t know where they come from, which country they come from and it is difficult to control them. People (authorities) are trying to do their best to manage social media but as a player the best way is to try and ignore them.”

“It’s important for him to just try to ignore those messages and to concentrate on his job and what’s going on in the field.”