Petero Civoniceva fears racist taunts in the NRL could descend to the level of European football if the ugly side of crowd behavior is not stamped out, after revealing he is regularly targeted by racism by fans.
The Panthers skipper was called a “f---king black monkey” by Eels supporter Sper Vega at Parramatta Stadium last week, before Vega was banned from attending any NRL game for five years.
But the Australian Test prop said it wasn’t a one-off incident, and that players now expect to receive similar treatment at certain NRL grounds.
“To be honest, it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last, unfortunately,” Civoniceva told Fairfax. “That’s the society we live in today.
“Unfortunately there are people out there who think that way.
“With the amount of guys from different ethnic backgrounds in the game, we need to start setting the tone for what we want, the standards we need to set in our game.
“The last thing we want to end up is like in European soccer, where racism is a real issue, it casts a real dark shadow over the game.
“Certain grounds - you can ask any bloke in the competition, especially if they are Polynesian or Lebanese - there are always idiots in the crowd that talk about those kind of things.
“Hopefully we won’t be talking about things like that in the future and we can get on and appreciate how good our game is.”
Civoniceva wanted to put the incident behind him and concentrate of the rest of Penrith’s season, saying he was satisfied with the response from both clubs and the NRL.
“I knew Parramatta, Penrith and the NRL would sort it out and I was happy with the outcome,” Civoniceva said. “I was happy to put it behind me.
“Unfortunately, the last thing I want to see in the papers is that kind of stuff, I want to talk about football rather than that kind of stuff.
“It’s over and done with. Hopefully it will send a message to people about the standards we want in our game, that it’s not acceptable.”
