UPDATE: Man jailed for three and a half years for assault on Sean Cox

By Michael Keaveny

A 30-year-old Italian man has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail for the assault of Dunboyne man Sean Cox. On 28 Thursday February Simone Mastrelli had pleaded guilty to assaulting Irish man Sean Cox outside Anfield stadium ahead of a Champions League tie between Liverpool FC and AS Roma last April.
Mastrelli, from Rome, had been extradited to the UK after being arrested on a European Arrest Warrant in Italy in connection with the assault outside Anfield on 24 April 2018. 
He entered a guilty plea at Preston Crown Court to unlawfully and maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm on Mr Cox.He pleaded not guilty to a separate count of violent disorder, also on 24 April, which will lie on file after the Crown accepted the plea. Sentencing by the Recorder of Preston, Judge Mark Brown, will follow shortly. Mr Cox's wife, Martina, was in court for the hearing.
Another Roma fan, Filippo Lombardi, 21, was cleared of inflicting grievous bodily harm on Mr Cox in October, though he was jailed for three years for violent disorder. A third man, Daniele Sciusco, 29, from Rome, admitted violent disorder ahead of the match and was jailed for two-and-a-half years in August 2018. 
The  53-year-old father-of-three from Dunboyne in Co Meath, suffered catastrophic head injuries in the attack. He spent four-and-a-half weeks at the Walton Centre in Liverpool, a specialist neurological unit for brain injuries, following the attack, before being airlifted to another specialist unit at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital and his currently undergoing rehabilitation in the National Rehab Centre in Dun Laoighre.