John Terry’s lawyers asked yesterday for the racial abuse case against the former England football captain to be dismissed from court, calling it “weak and tenuous.”
The Chelsea captain is accused of calling Queens Park Rangers player Anton Ferdinand a “f****g black c**t” during a match between Chelsea and QPR on October 23 last year.
Terry, standing trial at Westminster Magistrates Court in London, denies committing a racially aggravated public order offence.
The 31-year-old’s lawyer, George Carter-Stephenson, applied to judge Howard Riddle to dismiss the case, saying Ferdinand was an unreliable witness. Lip-reading experts agreed it was impossible to clarify what was said at the key moment from the footage, he added.
The case was “so weak and tenuous it does not warrant it going any further,” he said.
Prosecutor Duncan Penny will respond to the application before Riddle rules.
In evidence heard earlier in the day, Terry said he suffered continual abuse during football matches but would not put up with being branded a racist.
The court was played a recording of an interview conducted a week after the incident between Terry and investigator Jennifer Kennedy from the FA.
“I have been called a lot of things in my football career, and off the pitch, but being called a racist I am not prepared to take,” the court heard Terry saying on the tape.
“That’s why I came out and made my statement immediately.
“I am not having Anton thinking that about me or anyone else,” he said.
Terry told the investigator he had only repeated back to Ferdinand what he believed the QPR defender had said to him.
He said he thought Ferdinand was accusing him of calling his opponent those words and was angry about it.
“I was hurt by it, taken aback and really surprised,” Terry said.
“It’s something I took and didn’t like it at all. I have never been accused of that before, inside or outside football. I took it to heart.”
He told Kennedy he spoke to Ferdinand after the match, accompanied by his Chelsea team-mate Ashley Cole.
Terry asked whether Ferdinand was accusing him of racial abuse “and he said, ‘No, not at all’.”
Terry told Kennedy that Ferdinand had been shouting abuse at him on the pitch over an alleged affair with a team-mate’s girlfriend.