SOCCER Uefa Champions League:Celtic are likely to escape with no more than a heavy fine from Uefa after the bizarre scenes that followed Scott McDonald's last-minute winner against AC Milan in Glasgow on Wednesday night.
European soccer's governing body will today open a formal investigation into the incident during the Champions League game when a spectator left the stands to celebrate the 2-1 victory before running past Dida, the Milan goalkeeper, and tapping his face.
Dida was then clearly guilty of play-acting, initially chasing the fan before falling to the ground and being taken from the field on a stretcher while holding an ice-pack to his face.
A Uefa source said yesterday that the goalkeeper was almost certain to escape censure, given that the fan should not have been on the pitch, but a more serious view would be taken of Celtic's failure to control their support.
A fine is the most probable outcome, along with a probationary period which would lead to full or partial stadium closure for European matches in the event of a repetition in the near future.
The worst-case scenario for the Scottish champions would have been if Uefa had followed the precedent of the Denmark v Sweden international in June, when a supporter attacked the referee; Denmark were punished with a 3-0 defeat and ordered to play two matches at a neutral venue.
But Uefa has stressed that, unlike the Copenhagen incident, Wednesday's game was not abandoned. It is also in Celtic's favour that Milan have intimated no desire to see the result overturned.
The case has a greater similarity to the one in which a spectator invaded the pitch and attempted to chain himself to a goal-post when Rangers met Maccabi Haifa in the Uefa Cup a year ago. Rangers were fined 10,000 Swiss francs (€6,000). The fine Celtic face may be more severe given that the spectator got so close to a player.
Sympathy for Dida is understandably in short supply in Glasgow, but the Brazilian also appears short of friends in Italy.
The newspaper Gazzetta Dello Sport launched an online poll yesterday asking whether he should be banned by Uefa and whether Milan should discipline him. By last night, over 85 per cent of almost 100,000 voters had answered yes to both questions.
Dida has been declared fit for Milan's weekend trip to Lazio, but he will first have a meeting with Bruno de Michelis, the club's sports psychologist.
"I'm making no excuses for the behaviour and the fan behaved disgracefully," said Celtic's chairman, Brian Quinn, "but the contact made with the goalkeeper was minimal. His antics have to be taken into account as well.
"He took a couple of steps after the fan and then obviously made this decision that he should go to ground. Unless I missed something, he was carried off on a stretcher for what seemed to be the lightest tap you can imagine."
A 27-year-old man arrived at Celtic Park shortly after 11am yesterday and then attended a local police station.
"Clearly Celtic take this issue extremely seriously and it is satisfying that this individual has been identified so swiftly," said Peter Lawwell, Celtic's chief executive. "The individual in question has now been banned for life from attending Celtic matches, both home and away."
Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez has described the defeat at home to Marseille as possibly his side's worst display since he took over at Anfield in 2004.
Liverpool produced a second below-par performance in the Champions League - suffering a 1-0 loss on Wednesday that leaves them third in the group.
"Everything was wrong," said Benitez. "It could be our worst performance since I came here. We tried to change things, but we could not - we were not good enough."
Benitez opted to include squad players such as Sebastian Leto and an out-of-sorts Mohamed Sissoko instead of John Arne Riise and Javier Mascherano.
The decision backfired as Marseille dominated the game. However, Benitez, whose side drew with Porto in their opening Champions League group game, refused to accept his changes were to blame for the loss.
"It is wrong to single out one or two players, it is the whole team who played badly, everyone was bad on the night. You cannot always play well, but you can certainly always try, and at least that was a positive to take from the match. But the only one . . . Frankly we only created chances right at the end."
Guardian Service
