Suarez’s taste for biting since he was a snapper
Chompeones! Chompeones! He’s the molar opposite of everything a professional footballer should be!! The lad is dental as anything! Where the world sees Gigi Buffon he sees Gigi Buffet! Enough already — that’s my little contribution to the picnic basket of fun. For more, much more, of this sort of thing, see the Twittersphere.
The alternative approach for the football hack is to reluctantly abandon the comfort zone of reporting on groin strains and tweaked hammers, don a most solemn expression, indulge in a spot of chin-stroking, ostentatiously clear the throat and let rip with a crack at the old pop psychology.
I mean, everyone else is doing it so why not me? So here we go.
Luis Suarez has what I believe is technically referred to as a prominent overbite, a facial feature which, when I was a nipper and the playground was an arena even more brutal and unforgiving than the World Cup, tended to have its unfortunate possessor labelled ‘Bugs’ or ‘Jaws’ or similar.
So I imagine that, when honing his football skills on the streets of first Salto and then Montevideo, young Luis shipped a lot of cruel and hurtful flak, and all the more because from the earliest age it would have been clear to his opponents that they were not going to knock the precocious kid off his football stride any way other than by illegality and provocation — two things Suarez, having gone on to become one of the world’s most lethal strikers, still has in his own locker.
And so I can just picture little Luis, having taken about as much personal abuse as he could handle, deciding to recast his imperfection as a strength, to turn his weakness into a weapon. Of course, I have no idea whether the kid ever sank those same front teeth into one his peers, although in keeping with the image of him as a wild thing, there has long been a story doing the rounds of his allegedly head-butting a ref when he was about 15.
As theories go, I reckon mine is about as useful as any other. Which is to say, that it is all but useless, since the bottom line in trying to analyse why Suarez has now bitten three players — and, according to fresh evidence, even contemplated taking an earlier chunk out of Italy’s Chiellini at last year’s Confederations Cup — is that his actions are unfathomable.
And especially in the context of a crucial World Cup game, with every camera and every eye upon him, rendering irrelevant his post-match observation “things happen in the box” — as if what happens on the pitch still stays on the pitch in the modern game.
While most English commentators have stopped just short of calling for his beheading, there’s much less of a rush to judgment here in Brazil. Indeed, there is even a significant amount of sympathy for the player, which is doubtless coloured by the us against them mentality — read South America versus Europe — which prevails in this part of the world.
For example, in the café in Rio where I watched the incident unfold on TV — and shared the ‘he didn’t just do that, did he?’ astonishment of most of the rest of the world — the owner was simply thrilled that Uruguay had knocked out Italy and more amused than anything else by the antics of Luis, guffawing loudly even as he made the universal symbol for ‘loco’ by twirling a finger to the side of his head.
Yesterday morning, Suarez was all over the front pages on Rio newsstands but the headlines tended to refer to things like a “nip” and “a nibble” and even “a kiss on the shoulder”, albeit that the paper ‘Lance’ saw fit to decorate the two ‘i’s in the word ‘beijinhos’ (kiss) by splashing them in dripping red to turn then into a pair of fangs. In many articles, the words ‘vampira’, ‘canibal’ and even ‘pitbul’ required no interpretation, while Google helpfully translated the headline of one comment piece as ‘Footjob Help But Not Head, Suarez” — which, I think it’s fair to say, legitimately allows the English speaker to insert the word ‘nutjob’ without significantly altering its meaning.
But generally there is much less hysteria in the reaction out here than seems to be the case in dear old Blighty, Brazil’s media altogether more exercised by the fact that the home nation and Uruguay could now clash in the quarter-finals. (Meanwhile, I can only imagine that in Ghana — the nation diddled out of a place in the World Cup semi-finals last time by Suarez’ goal line handball — there has been an outbreak of schadenfreude on an epic scale).
And still we come back to the insoluble puzzle: why oh why did Suarez do it again? Even if it’s some kind of irresistible, overwhelming Tourettes-type impulse, you would think the drastic consequences, already so familiar to him, would by now be sufficient deterrent. And not just for him but, in the context of this World Cup, for his national team, who will now be, if not quite toothless in attack, then certainly giving Colombia one less thing to worry about when they meet at the Maracana here in Rio on Saturday.
Still revered at home and reviled even more abroad, Suarez’ fate is now in Fifa’s hands and, in a stand-off between video evidence and Montevideo evidence, there can surely be only one big loser.
So what more can we say about Luis Suarez and his uncontrollable choppers, except to quote legendary pundit Oscar Wilde who, as ever, said it first and said it best: the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.
