We know David Cameron should be more concerned about a double dip recession than a footballer having a double nip.
The fact that Luis Suarez munched on a defender’s arm is hardly a subject worthy of a Prime Minster’s intervention and his attempts to play the concerned father moralising about the potential example set to his son would be more convincing if he wasn’t guilty on occasion of accidentally leaving his child behind in a local boozer.
It’s easy to bang on about football and role models. They are highly visible individuals. They attract headlines, adulation and envy in equal measure, while providing plenty of opportunities for an indignant tut and shake of the head.
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Having said that, no footballer ran drunkenly along a street and careered straight in front of a bus like NHS-botherer Danny Cipriani this week. But strangely, there is not quite so much pressure on other sections of society to be ‘role models’. Take Members of Parliament, for instance.
When MP Eric Joyce was dragged from a bar at the House of Commons by Police officers a few weeks ago after butting another MP you might have expected a ferocious condemnation of this yobbish act from 10 Downing Street followed by statements on the ‘appalling example set to the young people of this country’.
Instead, when questions were asked about Joyce’s fate, the PM’s spokesman said: ‘That is a matter for Mr Joyce.’ Had he played for a Premier League club, there would have been questions in Parliament and MPs grandstanding on breakfast TV.
Shameless political opportunism is nothing new when it comes to football. Tony Blair started it and Cameron is continuing the lame tradition. But even if his view was unhelpful and a vaguely tragic attempt to appear like an ‘ordinary bloke’, the PM didn’t say anything especially outrageous about Suarez.
Certainly, the idea that the Liverpool player is the victim of some orchestrated conspiracy involving the Government, the entire disciplinary structure of the FA, MI5, Dame Judi Dench, the British Dental Association, the Society Against Cannibalism in Sport and whatever cockamamie theory anyone might throw into the mix is completely preposterous.
Here are the facts. Suarez received a 10-match ban for deciding Branislav Ivanovic’s arm might make a decent Sunday lunch because:a) The independent FA panel felt the incident was ‘exceptional’ and damaged the image of the game around the world. b) And that’s it.
Really David? The Prime Minister has been too quick to offer his thoughts on the controversyI could have predicted an eight to 12-game sanction would follow his attempt to sample some Branislav tartare before Cameron weighed in. The last time Suarez did something similar in the Netherlands, he received a seven-match suspension. Logic and natural justice says a second biting offence requires a sterner punishment.
Had the FA come up with a lesser ban, they would have been slated for being ‘weaker’ than their Dutch counterparts. They are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Not that the independent panel could admit as much in their report, of course.
Many of the arguments offered up to decry the ban are irrelevant, blatant propaganda, or more of the blinkered, tribal guff and misplaced outrage that accompanies absolutely anything and everything to do with football in the modern era.
Not one person in a position of authority was suggesting, as Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers claimed, that Suarez should be ‘thrown to the garbage’.
Personally, I’d make him sift through a few bins in the hope he might find a discarded bone to gnaw on instead of an opponent’s arm, but he was not being hurled anywhere. Yet the shrill whining that Suarez was the injured party in all of this was deafening.
Anfield goalkeeper Pepe Reina sobbed that his team-mate was being ‘lynched’. Uruguayan apologist Gus Poyet bleated that Suarez did ‘no harm — a little pain’ and should be left to continue untroubled because he had said sorry.
Victim? Fans have been queuing up to mock the incident, but it is no laughing matter for Liverpool
Rodgers said: ‘The punishment was against the man, not the offence.’
I like Brendan. He is one of the sanest individuals I have met in (or out of) the game. We agree Suarez’s diving is highlighted more often than Gareth Bale’s because of the Uruguayan’s character. But on this specific ban we profoundly disagree.
The punishment is not ‘against the man’. It is against the man that has committed precisely the same offence in the past.
The players’ union and Liverpool can talk about how his conduct might improve with ‘anger management’ classes all they like. I hope it works.
But that is the responsibility of Liverpool and the individual player. Football owes Suarez nothing. He is a well-paid employee who broke FA rules. If he needs psychiatric help to conquer these anti-social reflexes, there is plenty of time for him to receive it during his 10-game ban.
Rodgers even says this punishment might force the player to leave the club. Again, how is this anyone’s problem but Liverpool’s?
Liverpool need Suarez, of course, which is why they are defending him. It’s a question of expediency. If Suarez were an average left-back, he’d be out the door. So I understand why Rodgers wants to indulge the player, but he should not expect the rest of football to do the same.
Stand by your man: Brendan Rodgers is in a difficult position, such is his side's reliance on Suarez the player
Comparisons have been drawn all week between his sentence and racism bans — which the FA have toughened up after a review — elbows, tackles, and numerous other offences. Some parallels were justifiable, but it did nothing to detract from the central issue that Suarez received an appropriate punishment.
Of course there are going to be inconsistencies. Go back far enough and you’ll always find them. But the people accusing the FA of contradictions on Suarez were often guilty of doing the same themselves. Liverpool complained about Cameron influencing the FA process, but effectively lobbied the FA for a three-game ban — and failed.
Don’t email or tweet to say I didn’t make a fuss when Jermain Defoe bit Javier Mascherano, either, because I did. It was this column’s lead item in October 2006. I decried the disciplinary process as a ‘joke’ when Defoe escaped further action because he had received a yellow card.
If that idiotic procedure is not overturned in the close season, the FA will receive another bucketload.
So let’s not feel sorry for Suarez. He has now wisely rejected an appeal and admitted being in the wrong. Time to move on, then. But the wannabe vampire got what he deserved, even though Rogers says: ‘Each time he makes a step forward we beat him with a stick.’
Yes, that’s because he bites people. And if he takes a step forward brandishing those teeth again, I’d advise swapping the stick for a wooden stake, a hammer and some holy water.
British racing posse quick to ride easy target out of townThey shoot horses, don’t they? Shoot them full of drugs, I mean. It turns out thoroughbreds in Sheik Mohammed’s Godolphin stable have been pumped full of enough chemical assistance to make Lance Armstrong question whether he picked up the wrong type of saddle all those years ago.
It is a fact of life that if money is involved in a sport, someone somewhere will cheat to try to win it. We pretend it is otherwise.
Scandal: Mahmood Al Zarooni and the Godolphin drugs case has rocked horseracing to the core
But it only takes one fool to make a mistake for the hypocrisy to be exposed. Mahmood Al Zarooni (below) got caught and he is now starting an eight-year ban after 14 horses tested positive for anabolic steroids. He was not only dispatched from the sport with indecent haste but told to take the blame with him.
But racing was practically on bended knee to his boss, Sheik Mohammed, for presiding over this stinking stable.
The British Horseracing Authority ‘welcomed’ the Sheik’s ‘proactive response’, hailed his ‘intention to review procedures of the stable’, thanked him for ‘fully co-operating’ and allowing the BHA to ‘provide advice of necessary changes to its procedures where appropriate’.
Al Zarooni was immediately described as a ‘reckless individual’ as the sport reached for the whitewash, in terror sponsors might become anxious or punters might desert them. The president of the Racehorse Owners Association insisted: ‘My message to members is they should not let this incident damage their confidence in British racing — which is clean.’
You can believe racing is squeaky clean. You might also wish to question why racing has been in such a rush to exonerate Sheik Mohammed. Or why Al Zarooni was not sacked last year when urine samples from two horses he trained for the Sheik returned positive tests.
The Sheik himself was banned for six months when a horse he was riding in an endurance event failed doping tests in 2009. The trainer admitted to administering the drugs without the Sheik’s knowledge. Perhaps the Sheik needs to get a handle on what is going on in his businesses.
Blighted: Al Zarooni has been banned for eight years, and 15 horses suspended in the scandal
It must be another source of embarrassment that one of the his wives, Princess Haya of Jordan, is president of the International Equestrian Federation elected on a campaign for a ‘clean sport’.
The Sheik also happens to host the world’s richest horse race, the Dubai World Cup. Last year’s winner was Monterosso — trained by the now banned Al Zarooni.
Anyone might think British racing is lumping everything on this ‘reckless individual’ and shying away from condemning the Sheik because he is the richest and most influential owner-breeder in the world, the Prime Minister and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates and a friend of the Queen. Oh, hang on. I might be on to something here.
Gayle forces big rethinkOver the years, my view of Twenty20 cricket is that it possesses all the subtlety, variety and skill of the arcade game Whack-A-Mole.
However, Chris Gayle took that crude slugfest to such extraordinary lengths this week I could only watch in awe and disbelief.
The West Indian batsman hit 175 runs off a mere 66 balls in an Indian Premier League innings that included 17 sixes.
Balls clattered into the grandstands, or clean over them. The only chance Gayle’s opponents would have had of making a catch was to stand in the crowd. I’ve never seen anything like it. Magnificent stuff.
