As various people (including Lazio's Mihjailovic) have suggested, if UEFA want to look through the match for incidents to act on they'll probably find several other things to occupy them.

Mihjailovic was actually speaking in defence of his remarks made to Patrick Vieira during the game. Paddy said, "There were a lot of bad things said to me and it they all came from one player - Mihajlovic. I was called a black bastard and a f***ing black monkey. You don't want to hear that on the pitch coming from a professional player. It was the worst that has been directed at me as a player. I talked with some of the other Lazio players and I asked them what they thought of that. They said they know him and he is stupid. They were sorry, they apologised." Excellent bit of stirring, M Vieira, although to be honest it hasn't looked like Lazio have a team spirit particularly worth undermining.

Mihjailovic's defence was that Vieira started it, calling the Yugoslav a "gypsy shit". He also said that although he called Vieira a "black shit", it "certainly wasn't racist". Errr, right.

Vieira went on to say that he wouldn't consider playing in Serie A again because of the racism. Worth remembering when the British press try to make a mountain out of a molehill the next time Vieira says anything less than totally in favour of the English game.

Returnign to Grimandi, he's alleged that the Lazio players were dishing it out even before the game started. "At the start of the game, when we shook hands, the Lazio players were spitting in our faces and making racist remarks to Patrick Vieira. It was disgusting behaviour. I thought we handled ourselves very well." Mostly, Gilles, mostly. Grimandi admits to striking Simeone in retaliation, but says he had no intention to hurt. Bloody hell Gilles, Simeone must be thanking his lucky stars you didn't have it in for him! Grimandi will of course deserve his inevitable punishment from UEFA, as he deserved that for stamping on Gary McAllister. But as in that match, surely there were worse things out there which they should consider too. How can Lazio expect to reduce the racism on the terraces when their players behave like that?

And on that subject, Arsene Wenger has added that the racist abuse coming from the Lazio fans throughout the game did their team no favours. See this newsreel piece. Watching the game on telly, there were a few times that the monkey noises from the Italian fans had me thinking it was Kanu on the ball, only to realise it was Vieira!

Lazio will presumably also be embarassed by the hail of bottles which descended on Arsenal players and officials leaving the pitch. Nice to know the result hurt that much.

And on that theme, a couple of nuggets from Capital Gold's radio coverage of the game, supplied by Peter Krige:

• The co-commentator (Tony Gale?), after the Grimandi-Simeone incident: "what a shame Simeone's been cut, pity it's not a bit deeper" (sentiments we at ArseWeb could never condone, naturally).
• Jonathan Pearce, at the end of the game: "We did you at Highbury and took the three points, We've done you in Rome and nicked a point, over 180 minutes Arsenal have been clearly the better team, so bite the bullet lazio and accept it... just accept it."
  That's the first Pearcism we've had in for a while. See here for a selection of some of his finest moments from Arsenal games of the past.