When former Manchester City footballer Ched Evans was found guilty of rape in 2012, I said at the time it was an unsound and worrying conviction.

The woman in the case never said she was raped but that she couldn’t remember what happened. Evans, for his part, was utterly adamant that she consented to have sex with him.

Yet, despite a lack of clear evidence in either direction and the fact that the other man involved in the seedy encounter was cleared, Evans was still found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.

The whole thing felt wrong. And then it got worse.

After serving 30 months of his sentence, Evans was released and set about doing what most people would do in those circumstances – rebuilding his life. And the first step in that direction was to get his career back on track.

But the baying mob on social media, the militant feminists and the bandwagon-riding media had other ideas. They wanted Evans punished and punished again, using Twitter, petitions, boycotts and protests to make him unemployable by any football club.

At this point Evans could easily have given up on resuming his football career and on clearing his name. But realising that the two went hand in hand, he fought on. His lawyers won the right for a retrial, and last week a jury of his peers decided he was innocent.

That’s right, innocent. Not guilty. Not a rapist. Not a criminal.

So where are all the public apologies? Apologies from those who originally decided this was a case worth prosecuting? Apologies from those who did everything possible to shame and humiliate the man? Apologies from those who made sure he wasn’t able to resume his career? Apologies from those journalists who started every article about him with the words “rapist footballer Ched Evans”? Apologies from the celebrities who decided it would be good personal PR to pressure clubs not to hire him?

Nowhere to be seen, of course. Not even a whispered ‘sorry’. These people were so keen to be seen taking the moral high ground, they never bothered to look into the realities of the case, just the conclusion. Which turned out to be flawed.

Let’s get this straight – Evans’ actions on the night in question were utterly reprehensible. The way he acted summed up everything wrong with modern footballers and their inflated sense of entitlement. But while he was guilty of behaving without a great deal of common decency, he didn’t actually break a law. Yet he had the best part of five years of his life and career taken away from him.

The last time I wrote about this I got a lot of e-mails from people asking me how I would feel if it was my daughter involved in the case.

Well, now I think we should probably adjust the question a little bit: How would you feel if it was your son involved?

How would you feel if your son was sent to prison for two-and-a-half years for a crime he didn’t commit?

People were so keen to be seen taking the moral high ground, they never bothered to look into the realities of the case, just the conclusion. Which turned out to be flawed

How would you feel if your son’s image was splashed across newspapers and television stations under the screaming headline ‘RAPIST!’

How would you feel if your son had razor blades slipped under his cell door to encourage him to kill himself for being a sexual offender?

As I said five years ago, rape is an evil crime and those who are guilty of it deserve all the punishment they get. I would never dream of trivialising it in any shape or form.

But this case was never really entirely about rape, it was also about vindictive, jealous people seizing the opportunity to destroy the life of someone who was richer, more famous and more privileged than they were.

And what about the woman in this case? She has endured a torrid time ever since she went into the police station to report a missing handbag and came out at the centre of a high-profile rape case.

She has been trolled online, forced to change her identity and is now planning to move to Australia to start afresh. Her life has been just as badly affected as Evans’.

And the real blame for all of this must lie at the feet of whichever bright spark allowed himself or herself to be influenced by the fact that Evans was a professional sportsman.

Because do you really think a case where the man says the woman said yes and the woman says she isn’t sure, would have gone to trial if Evans hadn’t been a millionaire footballer? I certainly don’t.

Justice may have eventually won the day. But absolutely everyone else involved have ended up losers.

The perfect bore draw

Why is it that games we get excited about up so rarely live up to the hype?

Foolishly I allowed myself to believe last Monday’s game between Liverpool and Manchester United was going to be worth watching, a potential classic in the making.

It wasn’t.

In fact it was quite possibly the least entertaining game I have watched this season. Simply put, United came for a draw and Liverpool weren’t able to do anything about it.

I said in advance that a game of this magnitude was unlikely to tell us anything meaningful about either team. But I was probably a bit wrong there as we did learn one or two things.

Firstly, Liverpool still have plenty of work to do. As the team improves under Jurgen Klopp, more and more opponents will go to Anfield looking to shut up shop. On Monday night’s evidence, Liverpool are going to struggle to break down teams whose sole objective is to play for a draw.

When your game plan is based on aggressive, attacking football and your opponents nullify that threat, you need to have a back-up plan. And Klopp doesn’t seem to have one of those in place just yet.

On United’s side, what we saw here was the first clear evidence that this is a Jose Mourinho team. Setting out to stifle your opponents may not be the Manchester United way of old, but it is very much the Jose way.

Whether or not their fans will accept that approach in the long run remains to be seen. But for me this was the first sign that United are getting an identity – something Paul Scholes said was missing in the build-up to the match.

Otherwise the only other thing I think we learned from this game is that the Budget isn’t the only thing capable of boring us to sleep on a Monday night…

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade