SUAREZ OWNS A DANGEROUS MIND,IT CAN’T BE REWIRED...
Sportsmail’s Ian Ladyman is outraged as he witnesses Luis Suarez bite yet again
AT the Fo o t b a l l Writers’ Association dinner to honour 2014 Player of the Year Luis Suarez, Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers told the audience he had been privileged to work with the Uruguayan and spoke of the lengths to which the striker had gone to improve his behaviour. What we know now — as many of us suspected back then — was that Suarez had been fooling us all along. Inside this gifted footballer’s head is a brain that cannot be rewired.
Towards the end of this awful game against Italy in the stifling heat of Natal yesterday afternoon, I had found my mind wandering to the next steps in this competition. Thoughts of tomorrow’s GermanyUSA game and Sunday’s knockout tie between Holland and Mexico had begun to occupy me.
There was just not enough to hold the attention at the Arena das Dunas two- thirds of the way through what had pretty quickly established itself as one of the worst games of this brilliant World Cup.
Suarez, though, changed all that and, just as he had at Anfield on
He’s angry, self-pitying, delusional
April 21, 2013, he did so with absolutely no warning.
This i s the thing about the 27-year-old that is so disconcerting. He doesn’t do vicious, stupid things at the culmination of a festering dispute with opponents. He doesn’t do them as acts of retaliation.
He just does them instinctively. For reasons that he probably doesn’t even recognise himself, he just does them.
I was at Anfield 14 months ago when Suarez sank his teeth into the arm of Chelsea defender Branislav I vanovic, and my experience then was uncannily similar to my experience yesterday.
First of all, I missed it as I followed the ball elsewhere. Then I saw the replays and suspected a butt. Finally, the astounding reality of what had just happened became apparent.
Watch enough f ootball and eventually you will see just about everything. There are only so many possible stories, after all. Only the names change.
You become accustomed to the cheating, the sly violence, the diving, the moaning and the carping. You think nothing shocks you but then something like this comes along and all that changes. This j ust doesn’t happen in football. Does it?
Suarez now has a dental crime sheet with three victims on it. To the names of PSV’s Otman Bakkal (November 2010) and Ivanovic we can now add Italy’s hulking great defender Giorgio Chiellini.
But this time, Suarez has sinned on the greatest stage of them all.
Prior to t his game on t he north-east coast of Brazil, Suarez had chosen to take on the British media again.
The sense of persecution he was encouraged to feel during his failed attempt to prove he did not racially abuse Manchester United’s Patrice Evra back in 2011 had clearly not gone away.
It was this warped sense of reality that Suarez took with him into this game. No matter what Rodgers has said to him, no matter the sessions he has had with Liverpool’s psychologist Steve Peters, Suarez has s t i l l not f undamentally accepted his role in the two major controversies that have coloured his time in the Barclays Premier League.
Suarez is an angry, self-pitying delusionist lashing out, in word and deed.
Yesterday, he reacted to his assault on Chiellini by throwing himself to the ground.
It was an act of inescapable guilt. Holding his mouth immediately afterwards will not help his cause when FIFA i nvestigate today either.
After the final whistle, meanwhile, he hid his face with his shirt. It could have been emotion. It could just as easily have been relief at his side’s qualification. It may just have been shame … but I doubt it.
Already, of course, the cover-up has begun. Uruguay coach Oscar Tabarez began it immediately after the game.
‘This is all a conspiracy,’ he said, rather preposterously.
‘People hide behind trees looking for a story. Those people know who they are.’
This, of course, is one of Suarez’s major problems in life. There are simply too many people looking to make excuses for him.
I do not include Rodgers in this. The Liverpool manager has done all he can to educate and improve Suarez.
Rodgers is rarely critical of his players in public but at the club’s Melwood training base he has not spared last season’s double Footballer of the Year. To call it tough love is to understate it.
Some people never learn, though, and maybe Rodgers knows this now. If he does not then he surely will when Suarez inevitably cites his ‘troubles’ as reason enough to ask for a move out of Liverpool once more after this World Cup.
His camp are already angling for a transfer to Barcelona, leaking information about the Spanish side’s intended bid. Barca coach Luis Enrique is keen on adding the controversial Uruguayan to his strike force for next season.
Suarez’s gifts as a footballer are beyond question. Already he has left us with two of the truly great and memorable goals of this tournament. The fact they both came against England does not really matter.
However deep his river of talent runs, though, it will never fully submerge or drown his dark side.
Italian machismo may prevent them complaining f ormally to FIFA today. Indeed, that was the indication last night.
FIFA should proceed hastily, though. They have to for the good of their sport.
As sad as it sounds, we must place this episode in the same folder as Zinedine Zidane’s butt on Marco Materazzi i n 2006 and Frank Rijkaard’s spit at Rudi Voller in 1990. That is where it belongs. After 13 glorious days, this fantasy World Cup of our dreams now has its first very real stain.