Search: 'Luis Suarez'

Seb Patrick mantains that it is becoming harder to admire or support a player who has lots of skill but repeatedly damages his club’s image

It’s difficult not to imagine that Luis Suárez has a “goodwill meter” that he lets fill up to a certain point before jettisoning all of it in one go. Having arrived in England fresh from serving a ban for biting PSV’s Otman Bakkal – and with his part in Ghana’s exit from the 2010 World Cup still fresh in the memory – it took a quick adjustment to English football for people to start thinking maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

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Dear WSC
Trevor Fisher (Letters, WSC 301) is nearly right. When Alex Ferguson was accused of driving on the hard shoulder in 1999, he hired Nick “Mr Loophole” Freeman as his lawyer. They argued successfully that he should not be punished as he was
suffering from an upset stomach and needed to get to the training ground quickly to use the toilet. I have always slightly suspected he got away with it because nobody in the courtroom wanted to spend a moment longer than necessary with that gruesome, messy mental image in their head. Which is now in your head. No need to thank me.
Jim Caris, Prague

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Cameron Carter analyses the different reactions to football’s many controversies

Just as there must statistically be teatime programmes on the BBC that do not feature Alex Jones or John Barrowman, so we must assume that there are gay footballers out there somewhere in the universe. In Britain’s Gay Footballers (BBC3, January 30), Amal Fashanu, niece of Justin, daughter of John, quested for a gay man among the 4,000 professional players registered in the UK.

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As fans of Manchester United and Liverpool traded insults the clubs looked more similar than ever

Liverpool and Manchester United will not play each other again until August at the earliest. We should all be thankful for that. The fallout from last October’s confrontation between Luis Suárez and Patrice Evra lasted for more than three months, incorporating secondary flare-ups at an FA Cup tie and the reverse league fixture. New developments were announced on an almost daily basis. Liverpool were accused of harbouring a fascist. Callers to radio phone-ins turned into linguists when debating the difference between “negro” the adjective and “negro” the noun. A pre-match handshake was subject to more forensic analysis than anything since the Zapruder film footage of the Kennedy assassination.

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It is important to consider the position of black Liverpool fans in the aftermath of the Luis Suarez race row, writes Janice Allen-Brade

I am a football fan, I have lived in Liverpool for 14 years and I am black. The controversy over the racist abuse case between Luis Suárez and Patrice Evra has made me rethink my feelings towards the city and Liverpool supporters. But that is nothing compared to the dilemmas faced by Liverpool’s black fans. In all the debate about this issue their perspective has been overlooked.

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