Luis Suarez, the most despicable top-league professional football player on the planet—and one of the sport’s most brilliant strikers—has done it again.
He has bitten a player. Again. Bitten. As in sunk his fangs in the shoulder of another man. His victim today was Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini, himself a thespian master of the first order, but in this case he was not acting. He was reacting as anyone would when a monster chomps at you as if you were a piece of prime rib. He had bite marks clear as an Everglade alligator’s chomps. And what did Suarez do? He sprawled on the ground in agony, pretending to have been whipped in the face, but more likely feeling the pain of his latest reenactment of a man starved out of his mind. But to do this in front of a television audience of a billion: what was this madman thinking? And what the hell was ref Marco Rodriguez thinking? Clearly, nothing.
World Cup 2014
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Moments later, on a set piece that had players jockeying for position near each other, and Chiellini probably wondering what next piece of flesh the Uruguayan cannibal would go after, Uruguay scored its lone goal of the game, enough to knock Italy out of the tournament and itself advance to the next round.
“Suarez is a sneak and he gets away with it because FIFA wants their stars to play in the World Cup,” Chiellini told Sky Sport Italia after the match, in comments reported by ESPN. “I’d love to see if they have the courage to use video evidence against him. The referee saw the bite mark too, but he did nothing about it.”
Let’s hope it ends there: Suarez should be thrown out of this tournament and be forbidden from World Cup qualifiers starting two years from now.
Suarez is worse than a monster. He doesn’t belong on the pitch. Screw his talent: the man is a criminal, a bigot and a menace no footballer should have to endure. This was his third recorded biting incident. He bit Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanivich in a league game in April 2013 season. Served a slap-on-the-wrist 10-game suspension for that (while some media, including the New York Times, continue shamelessly to qualify the incident as Suarez “apparently” biting another player). In November 2010, Suarez bit Otman Bakkal of PSV Eindhoven, when Suarez was playing for the Dutch football league’s Ajax. He got seven games for that.
In 2011 he called Chelsea’s Patrice Evra, the French national player, all sorts of bigoted names throughout a game, including a Uruguayan version of nigger that Suarez actually defended, saying in Uruguay it’s not as big a deal. He got an eight-match suspension for that. But when’s the gingerbread treatment going to end? The guy needs to be knocked out of the game for a year. All competitions. Then serve out the ban for the qualifiers to the next World Cup. Maybe then he’ll get the message.
Instead he gets his agent to line-up interviews with arbiters of taste like the Times, which grants him a lavish, absolving headline in May (“Luis Suarez Reaps the Benefits of Good Behavior”) while an ESPN portrait a colleague sent me goes as far as justifying the biting by way of outrageous psychobabble, such as: “A man doesn’t bite simply because he is crazy. He bites because he is clinging to a new life, terrified of being sucked back into the one he left behind.” ESPN’s Wright Thompson goes so far as to claim that because Suarez doesn’t want to go back to the poverty he came from, he fights ferociously on the field, and occasionally bites.
Absurd. There’s nothing special about Suarez in that regard. The majority of Latin American players emerged from poverty and play all over the world. You don’t hear of them masticating the living schnitzel out of their opponents.
In a piece on Uruguay a few days back I laid out the facts on the despicable Suarez, “apparently” upsetting a commenter, who took me to task for focusing on Suarez’s incisors and of course telling me how I “don’t know what Suarez had to endure when he arrived in the European soccer league to make it to where he’s been.”
I think I do, having endured so many rehabilitating feature stories about the little chomp of horrors that I wondered whether he had the same agent as Richard Nixon. But that’s beside the point. The more relevant point is that it doesn’t matter what he endured. It’s irrelevant. His cannibalism isn’t. If Suarez appears again on the pitch in Uruguay’s round-of-16 match, this World Cup, so far the most entertaining in memory, will have lost its magic, and FIFA will have once again proven what a corrupt, immoral organization it is.
Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. Reach him by email here.
Cristine says
Listen, I am just as shocked as the many true soccer fans about this incident, but I –as an American-born citizen—happen to believe in the concept that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, in any part of the world, and so it will be up to FIFA, the coaches, and the soccer leagues to decide how this matter will be carried out and if Suarez will be penalized.
Please do not demoralize the sport of soccer (Fútbol!) by making everything seem hopeless and corrupt. Who the hell are you to pre-judge the game and all that it has stood for? Is it really that corrupt? Honestly! We have baseball/football players in America arranging dog fights, beating their wives, taking steroids, murdering people, and God knows what else! And you want to focus on trivialities, again.
My belief is that you probably hate to write about soccer because you don’t seem to write with a great deal of passion about the sport only the sensational headlines regarding the players….The fact is that the World Cup is the greatest cultural sporting event next to the Olympic Games, and it should be cherished and honored within every country’s tradition.
You, sir, are a backwards American who does not want to see Fútbol ever become mainstream in the U.S. and have a lasting, permanent impact on the social-culture of the American people because then you will have to continue to force yourself to be creative and write about something that you dislike. Well tough! Get another job, sir, if that is how you feel.
So, of course, you enjoy depicting these players who demonstrate considerable personal defects as a symbol of what the sport and the culture behind Fútbol represent. But again, you are not the judge here. Do your job as a sports reporter and tone down the theatrical verbiage…Sounds like you’re trying to create a little controversy to serve your own needs. Coward.
ⓖⓔⓔⓩⓔⓡ says
I don’t give two sh**s about soccer (Fútbol), and most Americans agree.
The author of this article is attempting to broaden his readers’ horizons by covering the World Cup.
OBVIOUSLY HE IS A SOCCER FAN (excuse me, Fútbol!)
It is you who is craven, trying to “create a little controversy to serve your own needs.”
In the tradition of Luis Suárez – BITE ME.
Binkey says
The video clearly shows him biting him. After that Greece won on a penalty kick in extra time that I don’t think was a penalty. Looked like he tripped over himself.
Bethechange says
Sounded to me that the author’s issue is with Suarez and he was more-than-a-little exacerbated by the relatively puny responses by FIFA, and NOT with the game of soccer or the World Cup. Relax! No conspiracy theory here. It’s a friggin game.
BeachGuy says
It’s the 3rd time he has bitten someone. I’m a soccer fan, fan of Liverpool, fan of Luis Suarez….and I say ban him for life. This can NOT happen again. I’d rather someone spit in my face than to sink their teeth into my flesh.
John Gibson says
In English Law a dog used to be allowed 1 bite .After that it could and probably would be put down. Mr Suarez has now had three known about biting incidents He is being fined by F.I.F.A. 100.000 Swiss Francs, about £66.000. Unless I am completely misunderstanding the point, this amounts to approximately one and a half days payl allowing for the little darlings holidays etc. out of his salary from Liverpool FC of £10 million per year. You are absolutely right ,a human bite is probably more dangerous from an infection point than a dog bite, provided the dog is not rabied. Oh God let it not be Suarez is rabied, for the sake of his victim. Clearly he (Suarez) needs help in more ways than one. I have not the expertise to proffer advise, and I think truth be known neither do the so called specialists studying human psychology. Cannibalism did occur in Uraguay in 1972 following a plane crash, but that is something totally different to this, indeed these unprovoked attacks, where clear unabridged (as far as we know ) footage of video evidence shows a single mindless act. If you ,a supporter of Liverpool and fan of Suarez say ban him for life, then it seems reasonable to endorse that ,looking from a disinterested viewpoint. It is such a pity so great a talent is ruined by this activity. To Little to Late yet again.F.I.F.A. has a lot to answer for.
Initialjoe says
Makes me feel better about our country and its’ corruption; it happens everywhere :).
Seminole Pride says
Once again the author is trying to shove Soccer and the crazy antics down my throat. Majority of us red blooded Americans could give a flying’ crap about Soccer, especially here in the South. I hope you give the Gators and Seminoles this much coverage when college football starts, or how ’bout NASCAR, you never say anything about that sport, and we live less than 30 minutes from the Great American Race Track !! .
NortonSmitty says
But we didn’t know they BITE each other! Man, all they gotta’ do now is put some nice foldin’ chairs down the sideline and let the coaches break ’em over their foreign heads if they run too close and it’s SoccerMania! I’m there!!!