Manchester City midfielder Yaya Toure has pleaded guilty to drink-driving, but says he had not “intentionally consumed alcohol”.<\/p>\n
The Ivory Coast player, 33, accepts he was “above the permitted limit”, and did not challenge the charge.<\/p>\n
He was fined \u00a354,000 – a means-tested fine – and banned from driving for 18 months by Barkingside magistrates.<\/p>\n
“It is well known that I am a Muslim and do not drink, said Toure. “I have always refused alcohol.”<\/p>\n
Toure was driving in Dagenham in east London at the time of the offence last month.<\/p>\n
He pleaded guilty to the charge on Monday, but did not say in his Facebook statement how the alcohol got into his system.<\/p>\n
In his statement Toure added: “Drink-driving is a serious crime and even though I was not intentionally consuming alcohol I accept the ban and fine and I would like to apologise for this situation.”<\/p>\n
The Ivory Coast international was recalled to the Manchester City squad earlier this month after apologising for “misunderstandings” relating to comments made by his agent Dimitri Seluk.
\n–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Manchester City midfielder Yaya Toure has pleaded guilty to drink-driving, but says he had not “intentionally consumed alcohol”. The Ivory Coast player, 33, accepts he was “above the permitted limit”, and did not challenge the charge. He was fined \u00a354,000 – a means-tested fine – and banned from driving for 18 months by Barkingside magistrates. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":276422,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[564,911],"class_list":["post-276421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-stories","tag-citi-sports","tag-yaya-toure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}