Sergio Ramos hits back: Mohamed Salah ‘grabbed my arm first’

Spaniard also has his say on Liverpool’s
Karius and Firmino after Real Madrid’s Champions League final
victory

One-Minute Read

The Real captain is Public Enemy No.1 on Merseyside and in Egypt
after his tussle with Mohamed Salah in the first-half of the final
led to the Liverpool star’s exit because of a shoulder injury.

Furthermore, Ramos is now being accused of concussing
Loris Karius in a second-half clash, a collision that apparently
was behind the Liverpool goalkeeper’s two subsequent blunders that
cost his side victory.

Asked how he felt at being portrayed as the pantomime villain,
Ramos told Spanish newspaper AS: “Bloody hell, they have given this Salah
thing a lot of attention! I didn’t want to speak because everything
is magnified. 

“I remember the moment well: he grabs my arm first and I
fell to the other side, the injury happened to the other arm and
they said that I gave him a judo hold. Now the goalkeeper has said
I concussed him in a clash.”

Proving that he hasn’t lost his sense of humour despite
all the abuse, Ramos joked: “I am only missing Roberto Firmino
saying he got a cold because a drop of my sweat landed on
him!”

As well as the online vitriol aimed at Ramos in the wake
of the clash, an Egyptian lawyer called Bassem Wahba has launched a
€1bn (£873m) lawsuit against Ramos for the emotional pain he has
inflicted on the country.

In Syria, meanwhile, the BBC reports that the tackle on Salah has been
incorporated into a legal exam for first-year students at the
University of Damascus. 

“Naturally, Ramos cannot be held to account for this
action from a criminal law perspective due to four conditions that
make the use of violence justified in sports,” runs the exam paper.
“State these conditions.”

Not surprisingly it has all left the Spanish defender
feeling somewhat bemused.

“I don’t know if it is because you are at Madrid for so
long and win for so long that people look at it a different way,”
he told AS. “I spoke with Salah through messages, and he was quite
good. He could have played on if he got an injection for the
second-half, I have done it sometimes but when Ramos does something
like this, it sticks a little bit more.”