‘The word negrito isn’t offensive. In Uruguay it’s a nickname. We share everything with such people, and use that word’

GUS POYET says he would die in defence of his fellow Uruguayan Luis Suarez against the Football Association’s charge of racist abuse. The Brighton & manager is not a man given to understatement.

He did not intend to pour fuel on the highly inflammable Suarez-Evra situation, he assures me, when he declared last week that he had never responded to insults — even though they had been frequent during his playing days in Spain — by “crying like a baby, like Patrice Evra”.

All the same, there are dedicated arsonists who get lesser conflagrations going.