Pool the collateral damage in latest controversy

It wasn’t the first time Luis Suarez left Liverpool wondering how to act. This time, though, he ensured they didn’t know what to say.

The club’s official reaction to the news the forward has been banned from “all football activity” for four months for biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini can only be described as such: a statement stating they won’t yet be releasing a statement.

“Liverpool Football Club will wait until we have seen and had time to review the Fifa Disciplinary Committee report before making any further comment.”

At the same time, it wasn’t unreasonable. By contrast, it was the response of a club who want to proactively show some responsibility, but are really just caught in the middle.

They are trying to take a calm and measured approach to what is an unprecedented situation. A player has never been banned from club football because of an offence committed for his nation.

Liverpool are this time the collateral damage in the latest Suarez controversy. By the time his ban ends on 1 November, they could well be out of the Champions League and the title race.

As it stands, Anfield sources are seeking legal advice to see if they can appeal the situation. Publicly, they can do little but gather information before commenting on the situation.

Those are the specifics, which remain inherently complicated. The wider situation seems less complex.

Ultimately, this is the risk of continually employing a player with the chequered history of Suarez. You leave yourself open to this.

If the 27-year-old doesn’t want to be subject to critical press or draconian punishments, he should stop getting himself into situations like this. He should stop biting people, at the very least. That is a sentence which is itself almost ludicrous to type.

Following his Suarez’s recent incident with Branislav Ivanovic back in 2013, sports psychologist Dr Thomas Fawcett, of the University of Salford, predicted the player would do it again.

“It’s in the man. I would think that, in five years’ time, if there was a certain nerve hit or chord rung with Suarez in a different situation he would react in the same way.”

It took just over one year, and is the latest in a long line of controversial incidents. As Fawcett said, it’s in the man.

Of course, there’s also a lot of talent in the man, and a significant amount of reward to go with that risk. You only have to look at last season, and the way he drove Liverpool to second place in the table. The club also deserve credit for that, given that they worked so hard to bring the best out of him on the pitch and off it, and suppress the worst.

At the same time, the indulgence of some quarters doesn’t help. The hugely questionable comments from Uruguay’s Diego Lugano yesterday were a case in point.

Consequently, after a third biting incident — and some of the denial that has gone with it from the player — the risk will apparently never go away.

Some in both Spain and Merseyside suggest the problem may go away in a different way. There is understood to have been a softening in Liverpool’s stance to selling the player even before all of this, and Catalan media are already reporting that Barcelona have struck a principal agreement to sign him for £80m, with Alexis Sanchez potentially joining Liverpool. The suspension puts even that in doubt.

Fifa have now made it clear that the worldwide ban on “all football activity” does not include transfers. Liverpool’s next move will say a lot.