West Brom have confirmed that Jake Livermore was subjected to abuse from a West Ham fan due to the death of his new-born son.
Livermore was involved in an altercation during his side’s 2-1 defeat against West Ham on Tuesday and ended up stepping into the crowd.
Livermore lost his son Jake Junior shortly after he was born in May 2014. An inquest the following April had found that the baby’s death had been avoidable and this caused emotional turmoil to the footballer.
In May 2015, he tested positive for cocaine and did not play for four months. He however did not receive a ban as a result of the circumstances considering that he had lost a child.
Livermore said in 2016: “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 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 saw it as another injury I could play through.”
