A prominent Brexiteer took an ungracious swipe at Marcus Rashford after England’s defeat to Italy in the Euro2020 final.
After a 1-1 draw after 120 minutes – Leonardo Bonucci cancelled out Luke Shaw’s second-minute opener – it was a familiar spot-kick outcome for the Three Lions.
Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka all missed from the spot, with Jordan Pickford saving two Italian penalties.
Speaking to ITV, Gareth Southgate said he shoulders blame for the shoot-out defeat.
“We prepared as well as we could for that and that’s my responsibility, I chose the guys to take the kicks,” he said.
“No-one is on their own in that situation. We decided to make the changes right at the end of the game and we win and lose together as team.”
On selecting Saka to take the fifth penalty and also making very late substitutions to get more takers on Southgate added to ITV: “That’s my decision to give him that penalty so it is totally my responsibility: it is not him, Marcus or Jadon.
“We worked on it in training and that’s the order we came to. My call as coach.
“It is always the risk you run but they have been by far the best and to get all those attacking players on you have to do it late.
“It was a gamble but if we gambled earlier we may have lost the game in extra-time any way.”
Rashford, Sancho and Saka’s social media pages were quickly flooded with racist comments, leading the prime minister and the FA to condemn the “disgusting behaviour”.
Darren Grimes, who worked for a number of Brexit campaigns, told Rashford to stick to “penalties not politics from now on” in reference to the child poverty campaigning he has been doing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May the England star topped the Sunday Times Giving List in a record-breaking year for donations.
He became the youngest person to top the philanthropy list by raising £20 million in donations from supermarkets for groups tackling child food poverty in the UK.
Along with helping charity FareShare distribute four million meals to vulnerable children during the pandemic, Rashford, 23, also forced a series of Government U-turns over free school meals.
As one social media user posted, “children were fed because of you. That’ll do kid”.
Related: England players subjected to racist abuse after final defeat
