The Vampire Witchunt

“He did not murder anyone. He did not conduct an armed robbery, or rob a car before driving 120mph down a motorway. The wrong way. Suarez did not beat up an old lady, fiddle his tax returns or misread the signs of economic recovery costing investors in a worldwide conglomerate hundreds of millions of pounds. Suarez did not do any of these things.

In fact, the more time we spend together compiling this list, the closer we might be to confirming that Suarez is, in fact, a thoroughly wholesome, law abiding individual who just happened to make another one of those daft mistakes he is prone to in a football stadium from time to time.”

I must have scoped through endless articles of the last few days before finding the quote above, many times close to opening my back door and launching the laptop at my little white West Highland Terrier who was minding his own business in the late April sunshine barking at the pigeons harassing him in his territory (don’t worry I didn’t).

What you should take literally from the above is my anger. And where is that anger coming from you ask? Well if you have seen any (and I mean ANY) news channel, twitter feed, Facebook video, new game alert pop up or a man at the bottom of your road screaming bloody murder then you’ll be aware that we on Merseyside are in the middle of a ‘lock your doors, there’s a cannibal on the loose’ phase in our lives.

There have been various sightings of this mad man as we peer around each corner to check if his blood dripping nashers are targeting us next, not knowing whether we will make it to the end of each day.
It’s all been too easy these past few days for the media as well as the wet lettuces at the F.A. It was a strange incident, one many will say ‘And just when you thought you’d seen it all, he bites someone’. It’s true that it was strange and it’s true I am not condoning what Luis Suarez did to Branislav Ivanovic. What he did was immature, selfish and all round stupid and its part of his persona that he must work on.

From what I do know, he is a family man, with a young daughter and a childhood sweetheart of a wife who keeps himself to himself off the pitch. His passion is unrelenting so much so that Jamie Carragher puts him almost alongside himself in that category. Something within Suarez ticks when he steps out over the white line, in front of the camera’s and the thousands of fans. In the heat of the moment his decision to react to whatever emotions he has felt in that instant was a bite. We are used to seeing a horror tackle, or an elbow, even a punch when a player reacts in their heat of the moment. A bite is strange behaviour, and it’s right that he should speak to Liverpool’s top psychologist, Steve Rodgers. And as Carragher said ‘we should help him, not hound him’.

To criticise Liverpool is unfair. My Evertonian friends may tell me I’m speaking through rose tinted glasses but they will also agree with me that the furore around this is quite ridiculous. Add this to the fact that it became all very easy for that fantastic institution of ours, the F.A to ban Suarez and you are in for a period in which the whole club is ridiculed.

And for those who say that two footed tackles, elbows and other such aggressive acts are ‘part of the game’, them I’m afraid you need to check your glasses........rose and tinted. These are acts added to an already aggressive game and acts that are fowl and in my opinion disgusting. I’d much rather be nibbled on the arm than on the receiving of a malicious high tackle. Football is a contact sport and I’m sure many who have the joys of playing football at any level love nothing more than a mud filled all out tackle that’s fair and ‘game-worthy’. And an elbow, well that’s just GBH.

For those who also say our children will be affected by this biting incident is completely ridiculous. When David Beckham kicked Diego Simeone in the 1998 World Cup and was sent off I was 8 years old. The week following that incident I’m relatively certain my friends and I did not produce savage ‘kicking attacks’ on other kids our age. Ironically what I remember the most is the effigy of Beckham hanging outside of a pub, printed by the media and for the people like some heroic act of righteousness. Funny how it all works isn’t it. What I would put it down to, the fact that some kids can be affected by such a baron attack on another human being, is poor parenting. The brutal truth I know but I’m not the only one thinking it.

The likelihood is that come September he will be tearing up defences in towns and cities near you, hated by the home support like a pantomime villain in his golden years, a caricature created by the media and F.A, heralded by the Liverpool fans like a returning hero, whose act of treachery is now a thing of the distant past.

And maybe that’s what it’s supposed to be; maybe this is the character Luis Suarez was destined to play since his days as a street baller on the streets of Montevideo. He’s made a mistake, and attempts to rectify it as well as making sure it won’t happen again are in place. Whether it works I’m not sure, but his footballing abilities are why I paid my ticket to watch Liverpool and Chelsea on Sunday. And that will never change.