West Ham look set to ban a fan as the result of vile abuse he directed at West Brom midfielder Jake Livermore.
The unnamed Hammers supporter reportedly made a remark about his baby son who died in 2014. That prompted him to enter the stand and confront the man.
The incident happened just after the West Brom midfielder was taken off during their 2-1 defeat to West Ham on Tuesday night.
Albion boss Alan Pardew said: "The only thing I know is that I saw Jake in the crowd which disturbed me a bit.
"He wouldn’t have done that unless he was provoked severely. I’ll talk to him and we’ll go from there."
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Was right next to the Livermore incident. Here he is being taken away... <a href="https://t.co/rhTmI44dsF">pic.twitter.com/rhTmI44dsF</a></p>— WEARNOWHU (@ironswhufc66) <a href="https://twitter.com/ironswhufc66/status/948314275839467526?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 2, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Livermore’s son died during birth. Months later he tested positive for cocaine, but escaped a lengthy ban due to the nature of the failed test.
The player took cocaine during a spell battling depression. In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2016 he opened up about the difficult time:
“Drugs were irrelevant. It could have been drugs, a gun, a car crash or whatever, the self-destruct button was the problem.
“The way in which (his death) happened made it difficult to fight my own demons.
“If you lose a child in God’s hands it is completely different. To find out why he had died, that was too much for my head and my heart to take.
“That pain and hurt, it makes you do desperate things. I wasn’t thinking of the consequences.
“I love my family more than life itself. You take that out of my life and you’re basically taking away me as a person. And that is what happened, I lost myself.
“I was broken. I could not deal with the loss and the circumstances of it, as well as the pressures of everyday life and trying to keep my team in the Premier League.
“If I was thinking with a cool head I would have asked for time off. But I didn’t want to let anyone down, I just looked at it as another injury I could play through.
