Bored of Education wrote:
Out of interest, has anyone seen or heard of one black Liverpool supporter that has played the apologist for Suarez?

John Barnes.

Taylor is an arsehole though. He's no better than Hansen and co. He'll studiously keep quiet when his UK members are behaving much worse than a man refusing to shake the hand of another, yet he pops his head out from his art gallery to have a go at the sort of foreign player he will likely not be bumping into at dinners in years to come.

This in the week where he has had a pop at another disappearing foreigner in Fabio Capello.

Sickened, twat. Some of us on here are sickened by the utter disrespect a growing number of his players have for the wellbeing of their opponents, yet he has nothing to say about that.

Suarez appears to be a deeply unpleasant cunt, from my Scottish/at worse Mackem viewpoint he strikes me as everything that fitba' fought long and hard against recently.

Is this really the worst thing that has happened in the game in recent times for you?

With regards to the footage, I'm hardly one to cater to the more crazed fringes of the lunatic Liverpool support but there's enough in that GIF for me to show it is not entirely unreasonable that some have chosen to believe Evra moved his hand away.

It kind of looks to me almost like a mutual thing. Suarez has his hand a bit high for a natural handshake position. Evra also seems to retract his hand closer to his side from the fixed position he adopted with his previous handshakes.

Now, he might have done this in anticipation of Suarez snubbing him or some other combination of actions and reactions of course. I do think there is enough there to suggest it is not as black and white as had been painted.

I've just been listening to John Barnes and John Aldridge on Radio 5 Live talking about the Liverpool situation in general, let's leave aside the handshake business here. They are both quite depressing in similar, yet mildly different ways.

Barnes is highly lucid when talking about racism in general, he expounds the view that it has never gone away and is still there, just less overt and hiding just under the surface. All fine, yet he steadfastly refuses to recognise that Suarez committed a racial slur in the original match. He repeatedly trots out the line that in his culture it was an acceptable and normal thing to say. He just brickbats any further analysis of the intricacies in usage of 'negrito'. Dazzling hypocrisy.

John Aldridge is a scouse mile away from lucid in any sense, I always marvel at why he is ever used for opinion when he really does come across as a guy they have dragged out of the pub after a lengthy session on the sauce. Like Barnes he is is highly, highly defensive of Suarez and Liverpool. His angle is that he hints he knows the 'full story', the stuff that Dalglish has repeatedly hinted at in the media but cannot talk about.

Like Dalglish, Aldridge does not seem to understand that the rest of the sane world are more willing to go on what was revealed in a thoroughly prepared 115 page report, rather than the chinese whispers of what they hint at but never actually divulge.

dalliance wrote:
Taylor is an arsehole though. He's no better than Hansen and co. He'll studiously keep quiet when his UK members are behaving much worse than a man refusing to shake the hand of another, yet he pops his head out from his art gallery to have a go at the sort of foreign player he will likely not be bumping into at dinners in years to come.

This in the week where he has had a pop at another disappearing foreigner in Fabio Capello.

Sickened, twat. Some of us on here are sickened by the utter disrespect a growing number of his players have for the wellbeing of their opponents, yet he has nothing to say about that.

Suarez appears to be a deeply unpleasant cunt, from my Scottish/at worse Mackem viewpoint he strikes me as everything that fitba' fought long and hard against recently.

Is this really the worst thing that has happened in the game in recent times for you?

With regards to the footage, I'm hardly one to cater to the more crazed fringes of the lunatic Liverpool support but there's enough in that GIF for me to show it is not entirely unreasonable that some have chosen to believe Evra moved his hand away.

It kind of looks to me almost like a mutual thing. Suarez has his hand a bit high for a natural handshake position. Evra also seems to retract his hand closer to his side from the fixed position he adopted with his previous handshakes.

Now, he might have done this in anticipation of Suarez snubbing him or some other combination of actions and reactions of course. I do think there is enough there to suggest it is not as black and white as had been painted.

As statto, I think it was, stated, Evra probably flinched when he saw who was next in line. But he just withdrew his hand slightly: he didn't put it behind his back.

In any case, if Suarez had intended to shake Evra's hand but then suspected that his move wouldn't be reciprocated, surely his best move was to have stood there with his hand outstretched, visably ascending to the highest moral ground that his position would allow and making Evra look the stubborn, truculent one. The fact is that his hand moved smoothly from the mascot's to de Gea's with barely a glance to see where Evra's was.

Suarez is surrounded by people telling him that he's been poorly treated and the victim of a gross injustice. It's not surprising that he refused the hand of a man who he, and seemingly everyone else, believes is the cause of all of his woes.

He's been incredibly badly managed.

Barnes would be better off saying nothing at all. He cannot afford to put the boot into Suarez in any way, shape or form because this would be automatically interpreted as a criticism of the actions of Dalglish, who is one of his best buddies and got him the Celtic job.

Aldridge is just a dumb fuck who, when Howard Webb once gave a debatable decision against Liverpool, tried to link it to Webb's previous employment with the South Yorkshire Police.

garcia wrote:
alex ferguson has signed 87 players? three and a half a year?

Between summer 1991 and summer 1999, for example, he signed only five midfielders, and one of those was really a defender (Johnsen).

The fact that six first-team regulars -- five of whom were midfielders or (in the case of Phil Neville) could play there -- came through the academy in the early-to-mid-1990s saved him and Man Utd a lot of money.

hobbes wrote:
Scott Parker has a lot more to worry about than Luis Suarez if his testicles really are an inch below his sternum. (Or was that just another of your Fox News-esque "facts"?)

You've an interesting grasp of anatomy yourself if you think that kick landed on Parker's chest. But if he booted him hard in the stomach instead of the testicles while the actual ball was high above both players' heads, then of course that changes everything.

The Purple Cow wrote:
Oh and is Suarez is the cunt you claim he is then that puts him in exactly the same category as 98.73% of people who are associated with the Premier League in any way what so fucking ever.

If 98.73% of (non-black) Premiership players ran around rubbing and pinching black opponents' skin while telling them "I don't speak to blacks, okay blackie blackie blackie", the Premiership would look a little less like the Premiership and a little more like the Iraq War.

www.liverpoolfc.tv/news/latest-news/luis-suarez-i-m-sorry

So that should put to bed the tedious bullshit that Evra was the one who refused the handshake.

This is a good thing.

(And what DA said of course)

So he's apologised to Kenny Dalglish and Liverpool FC. Good man.

Is the handshake meaningless? Only in that the enforced shaking of hands at the start of every game is meaningless. That the FA has refused to consider reviewing them would indicate that the media and TV companies want them to stay and the FA is loathe to stand up to them. The fact that they exist means that they can be examined and interpreted and reinterpreted and hidden meaning can be attached to them. Suarez would have known this to be the case from the moment he withdrew his hand. He may not be the sharpest tool in the box but he surely can't be so stupid to have realised that the world's eyes were upon this game and this issue, it's been the major talking point of the game since the hearing that banned Suarez in the first place.
Has he been poorly managed? Yes. Dalglish has had the opportunity to deal with this since day one. He could have admitted to the racist abuse by his player and offered to deal with it. He could have accepted the finding of the hearing without question and asked that everyone be aware that Suarez was aware of his wrongdoing and would be sure not to repeat the incident whilst a Liverpool player. He could have told Suarez to shake Evra's hand, to at least allow the club to start putting the issue behind them and start rebuilding their reputation. Even after Suarez refused to shake hands, he would have only have had to say that he would review the incident with Suarez and act upon it in whatever manner he felt appropriate. Instead his self-righteous indignation, his paranoia and his blinkered view on the whole issue coupled with his mollycoddling and pampering of a spoilt player has destroyed his reputation and that of Liverpool.
Also with regard to Dalglish and the club, why have they not been given a disrepute charge by the FA? They accused the panel of bias and of making a decision before even questioning Suarez. They had the chance to appeal the decision but chose not to. However, in doing so they then set out to undermine the findings of the panel in the statement, and ever since, Dalglish has continued to protest Suarez's innocence. By doing so they are questioning the integrity and are showing a blatant disregard for the findings of the panel. This panel were carefully selected to deliberate this issue in a fair and just manner, but if you were to believe Liverpool's interpretation then you could be inclined to think it was made up of Gary Neville, Boris Johnson and Kelvin MacKenzie all stood in a circle discussing whilst simultaneously urinating into the forcibly gaped mouth of a trussed up Cilla. If this same attitude was shown toward a referee, then Dalglish would be called in to answer a disrepute charge without question, so why not here?

People do apologise when they don't feel that they're in the wrong, just to put an argument to an end. We've all been there!

dogbeak wrote:
So he's apologised to Kenny Dalglish and Liverpool FC. Good man.
So just Patrice Evra, the majority of disappointed football fans and every black person to go, then.

Liverpool Managing Director Ian Ayre has today released the following statement.

"We are extremely disappointed Luis Suarez did not shake hands with Patrice Evra before yesterday's game. The player had told us beforehand that he would, but then chose not to do so.

"He was wrong to mislead us and wrong not to offer his hand to Patrice Evra. He has not only let himself down, but also Kenny Dalglish, his teammates and the Club. It has been made absolutely clear to Luis Suarez that his behaviour was not acceptable.

"Luis Suarez has now apologised for his actions which was the right thing to do. However, all of us have a duty to behave in a responsible manner and we hope that he now understands what is expected of anyone representing Liverpool Football Club."

Liverpool Managing Director Ian Ayre has today released the following statement.

"We are extremely disappointed Luis Suarez did not shake hands with Patrice Evra before yesterday's game. The player had told us beforehand that he would, but then chose not to do so.

"He was wrong to mislead us and wrong not to offer his hand to Patrice Evra. He has not only let himself down, but also Kenny Dalglish, his teammates and the Club. It has been made absolutely clear to Luis Suarez that his behaviour was not acceptable.

"Luis Suarez has now apologised for his actions which was the right thing to do. However, all of us have a duty to behave in a responsible manner and we hope that he now understands what is expected of anyone representing Liverpool Football Club."

www.liverpoolfc.tv/news/latest-news/ian-ayre-luis-was-wrong

TonTon wrote:
Liverpool Managing Director Ian Ayre has today released the following statement.

"We are extremely disappointed Luis Suarez did not shake hands with Patrice Evra before yesterday's game. The player had told us beforehand that he would, but then chose not to do so.

"He was wrong to mislead us and wrong not to offer his hand to Patrice Evra. He has not only let himself down, but also Kenny Dalglish, his teammates and the Club. It has been made absolutely clear to Luis Suarez that his behaviour was not acceptable.

"Luis Suarez has now apologised for his actions which was the right thing to do. However, all of us have a duty to behave in a responsible manner and we hope that he now understands what is expected of anyone representing Liverpool Football Club."
Following which, Ian Ayre closed the door to his stable whilst watching his horse disappear over the brow of the hill.

It's the fans I feel sorry for. All those wasted hours on Twitter with the ruler and the Photoshop trying to prove where Evra's hand was.

It's people like Moolag I feel sorry for.
All that bluster and Ian Ayre has just blown it out of the water.

Sean of the Shed's posts on this have been outstanding.

So just Patrice Evra, the majority of disappointed football fans and every black person to go, then.
Quite. It might have rung a little truer had he not needed quite so much public persuasion to issue this 'apology'. But it's a start, I suppose.

[Barnes] repeatedly trots out the line that in his culture it was an acceptable and normal thing to say.
Given what he went through 25 years ago, I'm amazed at the reaction of John Barnes to all this. What's 'acceptable in another culture' is not an excuse, and Barnes of all people must know this. I mean, there are cultures on this planet that don't believe the subjugation of minorities in more violent ways is 'offensive', either - so would Barnes believe a player should expect understanding in a case like that? Of course he bloody wouldn't.

So - now that Suarez has coughed, when should we all expect the apology from Dalglish for his part in this fiasco?

Suarez's apology on video. In fairness, when you see it in person he is fairly contrite: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSHaCzb3yYk

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:
Also It would seem that he was discouraged from signing black players at blackburn.

Was he? There were four black players at Blackburn (Peter Baah, Richard Brown, Howard Gayle, Lenny Johnrose) when Dalglish arrived.