“Some fava beans and a nice chianti for Mr. Suarez”

I could not quite believe what I was seeing when I watched Match of the Day last weekend and saw Luis Suarez take a bite out of Branislav Ivanovic; no doubt I wasn’t the only one who watched it in total amazement. It appeared to me that Suarez was trying to provoke his opponent into a foul that would earn Liverpool a penalty; they were 2-1 down at the time. As it happens, Ivanovic wrestled Suarez to the ground, which was a pretty mild reaction all things considered, but the referee awarded Liverpool only a corner. Obviously he knew something had gone on, but equally obviously had missed the Hannibal Lecter impression.

Luis Suarez

Hannibal Lecter

So Suarez stayed on the pitch and went on to score Liverpool’s equalizer, leaving Chelsea somewhat peeved at the injustice of it all. Suarez has form in the arm biting stakes, having also done so while playing in Holland. Put this together with his deliberate handball when playing for Uruguay that denied Ghana a certain goal in the 2010 World Cup plus his reputation for simulation and it’s easy to see why he will never win any popularity contests.

It has been suggested that Suarez has anger management issues. In the case of his bite on Ivanovic I wouldn’t say that it was done out of anger; anger usually spurs an uncontrolled reaction, the retaliatory kick or punch. Suarez’s bite looked to me to be the pre-meditated action of a man whose team were losing and who was trying, as I said, to win a penalty.

There is an argument that what Suarez did was not as bad as the knee high or over the top tackle that can potentially end an opponent’s career. Perhaps so, but these types of tackles are less likely to be premeditated, rather they may result from miscalculation or bad timing (not all of them, granted but many). The player who deliberately, maliciously goes over the top deserves as much opprobrium as does Suarez for his bite, but the slightly warped British sense of values and fair play sometimes overlooks these types of incidents as part and parcel of the game. I suppose that the reason for this is that as a nation we have an ethos of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Tackling is a legitimate part of football and the tackle that ends up as a leg breaker is often excused as a genuine but over enthusiastic attempt to get the ball, but biting can’t be seen in any way as being accidental or a miscalculation.

Again, the British culture of fair play is able to accept (up to a point) what we may call honest fouls, for example the rugby style tackle on the forward who is clean through and the retaliatory punch thrown (usually off target) by the forward. Whilst nowadays both of these offences would result in dismissal, back when I started watching football they would have resulted in no more than a stern lecture from the referee; times change! What the British sports fan finds less acceptable is the sly or underhand antics that Suarez’s bite typified.

This was the case even back in the 1960’s and 1970’s when the English game was somewhat more robust than it is now. Players like Norman Hunter and Ron Harris, with their respective sobriquets of “Bites yer legs” (not literally) and Chopper were examples of forceful defenders who thought nothing of giving opposing forwards a kick now and again, these were the days of course before the tackle from behind was outlawed. Forwards like Denis Law and Francis Lee were no shrinking violets either and were quite capable of giving as good as they got. But for all that Hunter and Harris were considered hard men, the antics of other players, and I’m particularly thinking of the 1970’s Leeds United team here, were not accepted by fans due to their being perceived as sly and devious.

Quite rightly the tackle from behind is now a forgotten part of the game but sadly the genuine art of tackling seems to have disappeared too. The block tackle and the sliding tackle, skills (yes, skills) that were a fundamental part of the full back’s armoury have now almost vanished. In part this is due to a lack of tolerance on the part of referees, but it is also due in some measure to the fact that there seem now to be so few players who can execute these tackles properly. Of course it doesn’t help that many forwards hit the deck squealing and screaming as though they had been stabbed rather than on the receiving end of a hard but vigorous challenge.

Annoyingly, the foul that appears to have become endemic in the game at its highest levels occurs at corners, where players hold, wrestle and generally manhandle each other. It really is tiresome and in my view needs addressing by the game’s law makers. Perhaps if a referee awarded a penalty each time it happened, rather than taking the safe option and letting it go, or worse penalising the victim, it might get stamped out. It might result in half a dozen penalties in a game, but it might also dissuade some of the more frequent practitioners from continuing with these antics.

To return to Suarez, Liverpool have fined him and the Football Association have banned him for ten games. When Suarez, then playing for Ajax, bit PSV Eindhoven player Otman Bakkal he was hit with a seven game ban so the length of the FA's ban does not appear disproportionate. 

On this occasion he should be grateful he bit the apparently mild mannered Ivanovic rather than someone like Ron Harris because rather than contemplating the length of his ban, he would in all probability be wondering when he would be released from hospital.