Chelsea Transfer News: John Obi Mikel Forced to Delete Twitter Account After Racist Abuse

Sep 21, 2012 12:41 AM EDT

Chelsea condemned racist abuse targeted towards John Obi Mikel, after the midfielder was forced to delete his Twitter account.

Mikel had no choice but to remove his account from the social networking site, after he received quite a bit of abuse from fans due to his mistake helping Juventus score the equalizer in the Champions League at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday.

Mikel gave the ball away late in the match, allowing Claudio Marchisio to pick out a pass to Fabio Quagliarella, who in turn scored for the Italian champions.

Chelsea revealed they were aware of the abuse, and had informed the police, with Mikel deleting his "Mikel12Official" account.

"We've been made aware of racist tweets targeted at Mikel which are totally unacceptable, disgusting and abhorrent," the European champions said in a statement.

"We've informed the police and support taking the strongest possible action."

Mikel added: "If I want to make up an excuse, I can. But, for me, I gave the ball away. I put my hands up, we move on.

"I'm sorry about the mistake, but there are no excuses."

Mikel has said earlier he was disappointed with the mistake, but felt his side should have defended the goal better and deserved to come out of the game with three points. "It was a game we should have won," the defensive midfielder is quoted as saying on the club's official website. "We played very well, had more control of the game and looked more dangerous.

"I'm disappointed, it was my pass and I over-hit it. After that we should have reacted properly but we didn't.

"The second goal was a cheap one to give away, we switched off, it was a pass to Eden (Hazard) that didn't quite get there and then we switched off, we should have dealt with it properly."

"We started the game well and scored the two goals. We had possession and had the game under control. They scored their goal, and then we came out for the second half in the same way we started the first.

"2-2 is not bad, we need to keep our heads up. We wanted to win the game but Juventus are a good team, tactically they are very sound, so we knew we had to dig deep to get our goals which is what we did, I'm just disappointed with the way we gave away the second goal."

Mikel also praised Brazilian playmaker Oscar, who marked his Champions League debut with two goals. "He's a great player, he's done brilliantly scoring the two goals, but his general play was good as well," Mikel added.

"Hopefully he's going to be a great player for the club."

"It's going to be difficult, obviously we want to win it again, we want to go as far as we can but there's no kidding about how tough it's going to be.

"Our first thought is to come out of the group stage and then look forward. Right now we want to take each game as it comes, and the next game is going to be an important one."

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