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Luis Suarez takes a nibble...

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A Ten Game Ban for Suarez? The FA have Got their Priorities all Wrong.



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This week controversial Uruguayan shit-strom magnet Luis Suarez has been rightly condemned for biting into a tasty arm of Chelsea FC and having a mid-game snack of their finest All-Branislav Ivano-crunch. He’s not adverse to footballer-based cuisine either, whilst he was at Ajax, biting PSV Eindhoven’s delicious Extra-hOttman Bakk-ing Prawns. Biting another player is mental to say the least, and the man deserved a serious punishment.

Today however, the FA have come out with a fat ban on a silver platter and handed Suarez ten games on the side-lines. It’s important that Suarez was banned, but it seems that in making an example of the prolific Liverpool forward the FA have betrayed their priorities with regards to racism. Everyone can remember the last moral volcano that erupted in Suarez’s face after he was handed an eight game ban for racism after a run-in with Patrice Evra, a nasty situation that hinted back to ugly memories of early 20th century racism towards Afro-Uruguayans.

So by my logic, a ten game ban for biting and an eight game ban for racial abuse sends the message that in the eyes of the FA at least, biting is worse than racism.

I understand the fact that in this case Suarez was warned by the FA after the racism incident that if he got in serious trouble again then the punishment would be more severe, but I find something fundamentally unsettling about the disparity between these punishments. If this was another case of racism then sure, stack the punishments as high as you like, it’s something that needs to be crushed from the game and from the world until it exists no longer. But this was different surely? Awful, but different.

Was the bite as awful as the pre-meditated challenges that left the likes of Aaron Ramsey, and Eduardo with their legs snapped in two? Was the bite as bad as when Ben Thatcher jumped at Pedro Mendez in 2006 leading with his elbow and rendered him unconscious, requiring oxygen and suffering seizures on the way to the hospital? I’m not so sure. It’s clear that the FA are making an example of Suarez, which I don’t care about, the guy has had it coming, the FA have missed a very important point here though...


Racism ought to hold a heftier punishment than biting somebody. I’m not going to launch into a justification of this either because I shouldn’t need to, I hope that everyone reading this finds racism as disgusting as I do. With all of the incidents regarding racism recently, including the FA’s refusal to deal with racist chanting regarding Rio and Anton Ferdinand at England vs San Marino from England fans, you’d think this would be a priority. Apparently not. If the FA are serious about ‘kicking racism out of football’ then perhaps they should start by paying more attention to these finer details, otherwise the grand gestures lose their meaning. 

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Jack produces topical blogs for Howtobet4free tackling the key issues in the world of sport. Jack also publishes articles for a number of publications each week, and can be found on Twitter by following @JWinterr.

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