Outrage as Timea Bacsinszky compared to notorious Auschwitz war criminal

The report appeared in Spain's Mundo Deportivo, in which Emilia Landaluce discussed Timea Bacsinszky's match against Garbine Muguruza in the final of WTA Beijing at the weekend.

Swiss star Bacsinszky, the world number 10, was beaten in the match, but for some reason Landaluce decided to launch a quite shocking attack on her in any case.

"Bacsinszky played a rough but effective tennis," she wrote. "So brutal, in fact, that - perhaps because both share an Aryan appearance - it's easy to imagine her as Irma Grese, the German concentration camp guard notorious for torturing her prisoners to death."

Grese was labelled the "Hyena of Auschwitz" for her crimes against humanity during the second World War. Though just 22 years old, she oversaw some 30,000 prisoners at Auschwitz and Belsen, torturing them with whips. She was tried for her crimes after the war and sentenced to death in 1945.

Swiss newspaper Blick contacted Landaluce for a comment on what would prompt her to make such a gratuitously obscene comparison between Grese and a tennis player.

"It was meant humorously," she said. "My readers know that I was trying to be funny.

Adding that she now "wants to apologise", she added that she "admires Timea's tennis" and "wanted to emphasise her strength. It was just a joke."

Those protestations have fallen on deaf ears, however, as Spanish tennis journalism's answer to Katie Hopkins has been abused and pilloried endlessly on social media in recent days.