Following all that went on yesterday with Luis Suarez is it time Liverpool showed the Uruguayan the door. Two JOEs argue both sides of the issue.
Sean Nolan says… for the interests of all concerned maybe it is time for Luis Suarez to leave Liverpool.
It is hard to think of a single example of a club letting a top-class player go for, to use Roy Hodgson’s phrase, non-footballing reasons.
Players have been sent to jail, like Tony Adams, and returned to their clubs. Players have committed every offence under the sun, on and off the pitch, and remained at their clubs if they were good enough. Adrian Mutu was shown the door at Chelsea after he failed a drug test but if the Romanian had been the leading scorer in the Premier League we have a feeling they would have worked something out, don’t you?
So, why should Liverpool buck with tradition and move on their top scorer, Luis Suarez? Firstly just because players are usually allowed get away with anything is not a good enough reason. That the game is a moral cesspool is hardly news but we shouldn’t give up hope that some principles can still exist in the murk somewhere.
Liverpool, and especially their owners, have to look at the way this latest incident is affecting the club’s standing. The fall out over the racism row with Patrice Evra was bad enough but this latest incident can’t be just ignored.
When he bit PSV Eindhoven’s Otman Bakkal in November 2010 he was shipped out the Ajax door just two months later. Ajax hardly had to sell, even with their exit from the Champions League after the group stages that season, but they did and they still won the league that year.
This story is global, including a prominent position on the Boston Globe website, home of Liverpool’s owners. Whatever about the odd dive, or handball, which will never make it past the sports pages, biting an opponent is the sort of act that makes it to the front pages.
The list of other ‘sports biters’ is not a pleasant one. Mike Tyson, Danny Grewcock, Dylan Hartley all spring to mind, as motley a bunch as you could think to meet. But even those lads only did it once.
There is no doubt that Suarez is Liverpool’s most important player. He is arguably the best player in the entire Premier League and there are few more exciting strikers to watch. But sometimes a player is just more trouble than he is worth.
Suarez is worth a lot, an awful lot, so that we are even talking about him leaving shows just how much trouble he is. And for the player perhaps a change of scenery is needed after all that has gone in during his tenure at Anfield.
There are many aspects of his play that will be missed, and Liverpool will unquestionably be a poorer team on the field for his departure, but there is only so much a club can take when it comes to the level of bad behaviour that Suarez has demonstrated in his time in England.
The saying goes that no-one is bigger than the club. It is time for Liverpool to put that old adage into use this summer.
Adrian Collins says… Luis Suarez has always been this type of character, and Liverpool were aware of that when they bought him in 2010, when he was already serving a ban for biting Otman Bakkal in the Eredivisie.
With previous form for this type of thing, it seems ludicrous now that people should be surprised that he’d do the same thing again.
We should not expect Suarez to be some form of moral beacon while he’s on the pitch for 90 minutes; he is one of those players who does whatever is necessary to try and gain an advantage, which we’ve seen before with his handball and simulation on the negative side, but his tireless work-rate and incredible ability to create something from nothing on the positive side.
Footballers are exactly that, footballers. They’re not teachers, or policemen, or someone that the world looks up to and respects because of their brilliant behaviour, they earn a lot of money to win matches and are prone to getting a rush of blood to the head; sometimes we forget that.
That said, the incident is bizarre and certainly deserves some form of punishment, which I imagine will be lengthy enough, and he will certainly miss the end of this season. He did the crime, he’ll face the time.
People, however, have short memories, and it was not so long ago that they were calling for Suarez to be banned forever from the game for his incident with Patrice Evra. I am not about to argue that perhaps biting is a cultural norm in Uruguay that we should respect, but certainly using every trick in the book to gain any advantage possible is, which Suarez has proved time and time again.
That said, not only will all of this blow over eventually and with a healthy dose of serious PR work, as his last incident did, but it also makes for something for the media (us included) to discuss, and for everyone out there to talk about ad nauseum for the next few weeks.
Both incidents (this one and the Evra one) are lamentable, and he should face punishment for them, but in the long run, a Premier League, and in particular a Liverpool side without Suarez, would be much worse as a spectacle. Say what you like about the incident, but that was some game of football yesterday made even more noteworthy by the bite.
While all of this is bad for publicity, Liverpool football club is bigger than Luis Suarez whether he stays or goes.
Suarez will be punished, fined and made to apologise and the public relations side of things will be handled hopefully better than last time.
Is he too much of a liability? I think not.
His antics are certainly cause for concern, but his ability on the ball makes the league as a whole more exciting to watch. If you’re sticking by your club colours this morning and voting on that basis, think for one moment of what you would be talking about were it not for Suarez yesterday? No brilliant pass for Sturridge’s goal, no last minute header, no Chelsea penalty and no bite.
You’d be stuck talking about Wigan probably.
