The five stages of Luis Suarez now depressingly familiar to defenders

It’s that time again.

Every year, regular as clockwork; the five stages of Luis Suarez. There is shock, anger, acceptance, belligerence and, finally, resignation.

SHOCK. Seriously, it can’t have happened again can it? There he is, ranting away about how the English papers treat him so badly and won’t ever forget his transgressions and why can’t they leave him alone — then bam! Or snap, or crunch, or whatever onomatopoeic word we use for dangerous fang work nowadays.

There will be those who claim they saw it coming, but you never do. At the one precise most foolhardy moment of all, when his country needed him and his past had at least been stifled if not entirely forgotten, he does that. Incredible.

ANGER. “The selfish little rat, how could he?” This is a Liverpool fan’s own stupid fault, of course. How many times is it we’ve stuck up for him now? There we are, hanging off the flimsiest moral branch; learning Uruguayan linguistics or brushing up on our amateur psychoanalysis for a goofy child who got his revenge any way he knew how…

He bit someone! Again! In front of God knows how many millions of witnesses, for the third time in five years. You know that moment in Tom and Jerry cartoons where the cat looks in the mirror and an ass looks back? That’s us. Well, no more. That’s the final straw.

ACCEPTANCE. He can’t stay with the club now, probably best to look for the best deal we can hope for, or cling to the dubious though unquestionable fact that this latest offence was committed in an international game and that’s all any (no doubt lengthy) ban will apply to. Get some decent cash in for him and give that to Brendan Rodgers, strengthen the whole team so we’re not so reliant on one man any more. That’s been half the trouble, knowing Liverpool needed him so much. Reduce that dependency and make the team better right across the board.

BELLIGERENCE. No, hang on. Is football so antiseptically clean that it can get on its moral high horse and stampede such a gifted talent away?

Are we really going to take lessons on how to behave from the likes of United, with their drug test bans (Ferdinand) and supporter assaults (Cantona) or their one-man threshing machines (Scholes) or the dubious behaviour of their assistant manager?

They all crawled out of the woodwork to pronounce from their sin-free clouds, even Alan Shearer who got away with kicking Neil Lennon in the face, and Joey Barton, the tweetmeister who once went to jail for attacking an innocent member of the public and stubbed a cigar out in a kid’s eye.

Everybody laughs at Zidane’s head-butt nowadays, and Cantona was even magically transformed into an anti-Fascist warrior, Trotsky with a black belt.

In March 2013 Sunderland conveniently forgot their new manager once gave fascist salutes to the slobbering Lazio masses, and only remembered it when it transpired he was terrible at his job. It’s apparently okay for Arsenal to bid for Suarez when he was already serving a ban for biting Ivanovic because no one questioned their morality, as nobody now questions the queue of Spanish giants grotesquely eager to purchase Suarez’s services.

Why have Liverpool got to be the only white knights in a sport where the moral compass has long since been scuppered by its magnetic core of cash? You know what, to hell with the lot of you. He’s staying, and you can all go stew in your stagnant, two-faced juice.

RESIGNATION. Who can tell what’s going to happen? It would be nice, just for a few short years, to get through a football season without having to try and defend the indefensible. That sort of thing wears you down after a while.

Can we really get Alexis Sanchez plus cash?

That doesn’t sound so bad, and we will still have Sturridge and Sterling. Oh, and Ricky Lambert…

Okay, all flippancy aside this has gotten really serious now. As Phil Thompson rightly said this is our club and he has just embarrassed us all over again. What other clubs do is their own affair. It’s okay saying you’re a cut above but that means acting like it, not merely paying lip service to an ideal and then wallowing in the same ethical cesspit as everybody else.

However, there is also something to be said for the notion that this particular morality ship, the SS Suarez, sailed long ago. We’re in totally uncharted waters and since we’ve come this far it’s rather late to get either hoity or toity now. That isn’t what’s going through Liverpool’s owners’ minds of course. All that lovely money from those lovely sponsors that might dribble down the drain because they’re none too keen on having their product connected to the recurring image of Hannibal Lecter’s recalcitrant child mopping up his fava beans.

That awful phrase ‘The Brand’ is about to rear its ugly head once more, isn’t it? What the average supporter thinks, shrugging their shoulders and whispering “so what else is new?” amidst all of the hysterical self-righteousness, will amount to almost nothing.

The bitter irony in all of this is that after a few years the people crying the loudest now will be the same ones complaining that the game is so safe and anodyne.

“Whatever happened to the kind of players that got people excited, got them talking, got them on the edge of their seats?”

You drove him off to Spain, that’s what happened.