Derek Beaumont opens up on the backlash to his Steve Prescott tweet

In the aftermath of Leigh Leopards’ famous win over St Helens, Derek Beaumont has acknowledged that he made “a horrendous howler.”

This is because in the buzz of the win he invited the late, great Steve Prescott MBE to a Leigh game having received a congratulatory tweet from his account which now represents his fantastic foundation.

Beaumont took full responsibility for the matter on the Eddie and Stevo podcast:

“I made an absolutely horrendous howler on Twitter. I am going through hundreds of messages, as you can imagine, we’ve beat St Helens and everyone’s buzzing.

“I don’t look at Twitter other than my own notifications and I’ll go through, and then one has come up – Steve Prescott MBE – really nice message.

“I’ve then not registered in my head who it is. I know who Steve Prescott is and what happened. I raised five figures for him on a weight loss challenge.

“But I didn’t read it as that, I just saw this nice message, quoted it back and said ‘fantastic support what a great message, thanks so much, be good to get you at a game Steve and have a beer’.”

The Leigh owner then went on to open up on the aftermath of the tweet:

“Everyone is then going mad at this Tweet and I’m wondering why all these Wigan fans are going mad at me? Because he said ‘never write Saints off’, I said ‘I agree, write Saints off at your peril’ because I still think they’ll be there or there abouts.

“So everyone is going mad and I’m thinking ‘why are you Wigan fans going mad’ so I said ‘I also wouldn’t write you off even though you lost to Hull KR and Catalans’ – so I’m wondering what’s going on?

“I was still getting hammered and I still hadn’t twigged because this Tweet has come from ‘Steve Prescott MBE’, it didn’t say it was the Foundation so it took me ages to register.

“But that was a massive howler from me and of course I apologised about it, but they responded and said ‘look what’s wrong here is people trying to suggest I’ve done that on purpose’.”

He praised the foundation for understanding the mistake for what it was.

He also noted that once again he will be doing his bit for charity this week as the Leopards take on Warrington Wolves:

“They understood it for what it was and a by-product of that I’m now I’m now walking to Warrington from here (Leigh) for a mental health charity, and anyone that does it with me, with some kind of leopard print on, I’ll donate £10 up to a maximum of £20,000.

“So hopefully we’ll be matching from Leigh to Warrington with plenty of Leopards on the road there.”