Luis Suarez appreciation thread

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Sell or Not

  • Yes

    Votes: 26 63.4%

  • No

    Votes: 15 36.6%
  • Total voters
    41
  • Poll closed .
Status
Not open for further replies.
carlthejackal said:
Lots of truth in it but undermined by the huge amount of unnecessary sacharin. <ok>

He came from a very deprived background. But he is not the only one who has. Very many similar players have come from dirt poor background especially in Africa but have become role models for all young people to follow. We certainly do not want to give players coming from a deprived background a bad name and class them as a bad risk. "If you come from a poor upbringing you could be at risk of doing all the things Suarez did/does on the pitch?". It can explain part of the problem but can it ever be used as an excuse?

As for being exploited and being mixed up, that is one of the very many theories that have been put forward. We have no evidence for it being more valid than others.

The reality is that raw tribal feelings will push more of us to believe this article and have sympathy for Suarez.

The plain and more objective fact is that Suarez whatever his background has autonomy in what he does in life. In society and on the pitch. He also has insight. It is a bit condescending to him and to us as fans to treat him as some victim of his circumstances and that he does not realise that he is being exploited. By whom? by Liverpool FC, by his manager, by the fans? By his country? By his own management team? Certainly not by the media or the press. They possibly crucify and demonise him but exploit him?
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a good point. many African and south american players come from awful scenarios but the over riding issue with most is unbridled greed rather than thsi type of lunacy. there is a choice with suarez. when you go after someone like cheallini you can drive your knee into his leg and risk being sent off or you can try to bite OR bizarrely you can realize TV sees everything and cheating doesn't pay.. and biting is what gets you done.

I agree by all means see the human behind the issue but if the idea is fifa has been too harsh and remember its banned him for over a year of international football here never mind club football... then the question must simply be whats going to stop him doing it again... nothing. its high time he made a choice himself and goes and gets himself sorted out. Fifa might well have been less harsh if he'd not been so outright untruthful in his defense of himself compared to the footage of his actions.

Indeed never mind that a bit of fake crying and teeth holding is ok but an admission and a bit of fake therapy to get out of it was too far.

The guy is all over the palce and gets whats coming. the world (most of which barley cares) is sick of hearing about the guys antics so don't mind him getting it in the neck (pun intended).

I strongly feel that if he does get something off his ban he's lucky but that shouldn't excuse the actions and his side has been eliminated from the world cup due to his actions... some might say he was looking then as them going anyway and was trying for a reaction. he's done the damage. the only question on an appeal is reducing it.

once that is done and the furore dies off I am sure we will see the guy sold post haste. If not the reality is the offers on the table (or not even on the table) are too small even with the risk of re-offence.
 
carlthejackal said:
Lots of truth in it but undermined by the huge amount of unnecessary sacharin. <ok>

He came from a very deprived background. But he is not the only one who has. Very many similar players have come from dirt poor background especially in Africa but have become role models for all young people to follow. We certainly do not want to give players coming from a deprived background a bad name and class them as a bad risk. "If you come from a poor upbringing you could be at risk of doing all the things Suarez did/does on the pitch?". It can explain part of the problem but can it ever be used as an excuse?

As for being exploited and being mixed up, that is one of the very many theories that have been put forward. We have no evidence for it being more valid than others.

The reality is that raw tribal feelings will push more of us to believe this article and have sympathy for Suarez.

The plain and more objective fact is that Suarez whatever his background has autonomy in what he does in life. In society and on the pitch. He also has insight. It is a bit condescending to him and to us as fans to treat him as some victim of his cincumstances and that he does not realise that he is being exploited. By whom? by Liverpool FC, by his manager, by the fans? By his country? By his own management team? Certainly not by the media or the press. They possibly crucify and demonise him but exploit him?
Click to expand...


All those situations are different, possibly for every role model that comes out of that kind of situation may be 500 hundred who did not.


it's not about sympathy, it's about understanding that he is not just some lunatic or animal, but rather childish and obscenely competitive and a not a great loser at all, to me these seem traits of childishness too.

Anyway, it's not like I am defending him here, if you step back from the fake morality of it all, he didn't cause either of those 3 players to miss one game, or even have to go off injured. He offended people's sensibilities. The social media and conventional media took it and ran with it and hey presto a hate figure where even non football people can join in on the hate

tell you this though, don't be surprised to see him make another ad, with some comic biting in it, he'll bounce back, he always does.
 
Sisu said:
All those situations are different, possibly for every role model that comes out of that kind of situation may be 500 hundred who did not.


it's not about sympathy, it's about understanding that he is not just some lunatic or animal, but rather childish and obscenely competitive and a not a great loser at all, to me these seem traits of childishness too.

Anyway, it's not like I am defending him here, if you step back from the fake morality of it all, he didn't cause either of those 3 players to miss one game, or even have to go off injured. He offended people's sensibilities. The social media and conventional media took it and ran with it and hey presto a hate figure even non football people can get involved with.

tell you this though, don't be surprised to see him make another ad, with some comic biting in it, he'll bounce back, he always does.
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"don't be surprised to see him make another ad, with some comic biting in it"

We should in fact be expecting it. The reality is that we as human beings always exploit opportunities for our own gain. He will get offered these and there is no reason why he shouldn't take them up. Who is exploiting whom?

The reality is that Suarez has done well from football. he also needs to have some responbility to others. By his actions, has he not adversely affected his team, his country? Has he not let down the poor people who depended on him for some joy in their lives? It also seems to me that by his actions he has brought ridicule on his country. When the whole country from President downwards 100% support him and his dodgy defence when the rest of the world can see quite cleary what happened, what does it say about their credibility? Liverpool FC has stayed quiet. I am hoping they will say they will help him in getting treatment but nothing about FIFA being too harsh or that he is being a victim.
 
carlthejackal said:
"don't be surprised to see him make another ad, with some comic biting in it"

We should in fact be expecting it. The reality is that we as human beings always exploit opportunities for our own gain. He will get offered these and there is no reason why he shouldn't take them up. Who is exploiting whom?

The reality is that Suarez has done well from football. he also needs to have some responbility to others. By his actions, has he not adversely affected his team, his country? Has he not let down the poor people who depended on him for some joy in their lives? It also seems to me that by his actions he has brought ridicule on his country. When the whole country from President downwards 100% support him and his dodgy defence when the rest of the world can see quite cleary what happened, what does it say about their credibility? Liverpool FC has stayed quiet. I am hoping they will say they will help him in getting treatment but nothing about FIFA being too harsh or that he is being a victim.
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I think rodgers really ought to be preparing for the questions as preseason is only a few days away and then the tour and he will be asked.

it's basic.. be prepared, don't wade in like a blundering dalglish and just do talk up the looking after the player and all that.. then sell the f'r and once you know you are not drawn against the spanish in the CL lay into him big time.
 
Skylarker* said:
Just read this article - Very interesting and well worth a read

http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/...azy-mixed-up-kid-not-a-bad-person-273535.html

On Tuesday a fragile man broke in the industry we all support. He cracked in the pressure cooker we all built.

On my way into work every morning I pass a mural. Sometimes I pause and just gaze at it for a while. That’s why it is there. One of the inspirational figures painted onto the wall is Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Science. There is a quote from her too. Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

I love that. The words apply in nearly all areas of life. We live in a world where trying to understand things has gone out of fashion. Trying to understand stuff takes a while. We like everything these days to be instant. The Luis Suarez jokes came instantly.

The one about his mother getting a job as a cleaner in a bus station in the capital and the whole family having to move 300 miles to live in Montevideo. Luis Suarez was seven and he was so traumatised he stayed behind with his granny for a month.

The cracker about his father walking out two years later and leaving a mother and seven sons to cope.

Or the kid having no boots and realising if he improved enough the club he played for as a kid would buy him boots. Or how his teenage girlfriend Sofia, who is now his wife, had to move with her family to Europe when he was 15. Suarez reacted like he did when he needed those boots. He played harder and harder till he got a move to Europe at the age of 19. His being depended on the boots, on Sofia.

Laugh? Far from it. Time after time Luis Suarez’s world got ripped apart and football put him back together. My favourite is the one I read about Suarez growing up in Uruguay in a culture where winning through knavery and roguery and a little deceit and foulness is a little bit sweeter. They call it Picardía. We call it being a cute hoor. There’s a thin line between being celebrated as a cute hoor and being convicted as something else. You learn that too late.

I think the Luis Suarez story is just desperately sad. I have no stones to throw at him. For a while now the Gaelic Players Association has been responding to the mental health needs of players. The We Wear More campaign (www.wewearmore.ie) which was launched recently is designed to emphasise a footballer or a hurler is more than just a footballer or a hurler. He wears more than county colours. He is a son, a brother, a nephew, a husband, a boyfriend, a student, a worker, etc. In one sense our members are fortunate that they generally maintain the support system around them while playing elite sport. They are close to family and friends and the club they grew up in.

On the other hand very few people understand the pressures they feel, or understand that being good at a sport and being celebrated for it doesn’t make you immune from other pressures and troubles. There is a fear for many players if they open up about that internal life people will say, oh yeah I’d love to have those troubles or just lighten up and enjoy it.

One thing we have learned in the GPA is it is wrong and dangerous to judge anybody without knowing their story. I look at a Luis Suarez or a Mario Balotelli and I read about them. Soccer has been their way out of isolation and poverty and fear. We give them money and expect them to cope.

Suarez arrived in Holland aged 19. He had the love of his life and he had his career but he didn’t have any of the equipment to cope. Keep winning and you can keep this life. Lose and you are in the ditch. That’s the way we feel when we are kids. That’s what abandonment does. That’s how it is for players on the edge of making it. More fear than understanding.

Suarez survived but he grew up with a distorted view of football. I really think he feels his happiness depends on it. You watch him play. Football isn’t just his job. It’s his dependency.

How many talented young players have been thrown away with stories which never get told. Gambling, drink problems, general behavioural problems. Good enough to play but not good enough to adapt. Kids who can’t cope get ditched early. There’s more talent at the door always. Suarez got through the filter. Too good to discard. Too screwed up to last.

Dressingrooms are strange places to grow up in. I’m not sure how you could grow adequately in the environments where Luis Suarez has spent his life. A poor Uruguayan kid. Then suddenly a rich Uruguayan kid thousands of miles from home. When he made that handball against Ghana in the last World Cup he got a red card and Ghana won a penalty to win the game. What serious dressingroom wouldn’t have encouraged a player to stick out a hand in the same circumstances. To take one for the team? Gyan missed the penalty. Suarez was in tears in the tunnel when the camera’s caught him shifting from despair to joy. He was the scapegoat one second, then the saviour who took one for the team. Uruguay won on penalties.

Afterwards people forgot Suarez had been punished under the rules. Ghana just didn’t cash in. Listen, how many of us list Thierry Henry’s handball down as one of the worst moments in World Cup history and Diego Maradona’s handball as one of the greatest? I watched that Henry incident in remote Zambia. The African next to me sitting on a crate supporting France didn’t see it the same way. Suarez was a hero or a villain depending on what colours you wore. Any wonder he didn’t come away with a clearer understanding of football’s morality code or how that code changes shape.

His abiding memory must have been that winning made everything ok again. In times of extreme stress it looks to me like he goes back to being a little kid on the street again. Biting and name calling. Being a cute hoor. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose it’s how you play the game? That’s not taught on the street or in dressingrooms underneath big stadiums. Winning equals reward. Losing for Suarez means everything he fears and doesn’t understand beginning to threaten him again.

He can score goals. That protects him. His dependency is football. His cartoon superpower is football. No matter what he does he is good enough to be sold on at a profit and somebody else will coddle him and use his talent for a while.

Just because he is rich doesn’t mean he isn’t being exploited. Just because Marilyn Monroe was rich doesn’t mean she wasn’t exploited. He needs to be helped not scapegoated and then serially sold on. At Liverpool last year Suarez did some work with the psychiatrist Steve Peters. I have read Peters’ book The Chimp Paradox and the man comes from a very interesting background of working with high-security prisoners. While he was in that environment at Anfield last season something changed in Suarez. When he started his season, later than everybody else because of his last suspension he was a changed player. His behaviour was excellent, his play was brilliant. He opened up as a family man.

In Brazil this week he was a South American player in the mad world of a South American World Cup. He was removed from that support structure which Brendan Rogers had put in place. Steve Peters was with the England team. The British media were back to taking pot shots at him. Not fully fit, playing badly on a Uruguayan team which was going out of the World Cup and being marked by a provocative Italian with whom he had history, Suarez flipped. Remember Zidane!

He went back to the old pathology. He bit somebody. In a stupid and obvious way.

At the end of the game against Italy he didn’t celebrate like he did against Ghana four years ago. He looked like an addict who was going to have to begin painful rehab all over again. It was desperately sad to see. Biting is an ugly thing to do, but nobody died. No bones were broken. Everybody else played on. The fuss was 100 times louder than when one professional player comes in high and premeditated with a tackle which could break a leg and end a career. That’s what it is like being Luis Suarez.

When it happened Suarez reverted helplessly to childhood, clutching his teeth, then saying his eye hurt, crying.

He has bigger problems than FIFA are qualified to deal with.

The lesson is that you can easily take young footballers out of the street and pay them big money. You can’t take the street out of all of them without a lot of love and hard work and concern for the human being not the player.

I think Luis Suarez is just another crazy mixed up kid. I don’t think he is a bad person. He has been saved by football and he has been exploited by it. His head, Marie Curie might say, is full of fears and not understanding. He has a psychological kink. Rather than nail him to the cross or sell him on for profit it would have been nice if FIFA had the wisdom to ask that he continue to work on understanding and on managing the way he reacts under stress.

The show trial was short and sweet. The punishment wasn’t as bad as the lynch mob were asking but it was still poorly thought out. I would like to have seen a good chunk of the bans suspended for two years pending ongoing work with counsellors and anger management. Instructions to take coaching badges. Instead the immediate debate was how much is he still worth.

It would be encouraging had they viewed this as a holistic problem and understood that Luis Suarez isn’t just the guy in the jersey. He is a human being whose development has been different to most people’s and whose work environment is extraordinarily pressurised at the best of times. He wears more. We have had beloved heroes whose sad dysfunction has been accommodated by the pro game as long as it suited. Imagine how we would hurt here if Paul McGrath, scarred by his own childhood, was thrown to the wolves the way Luis Suarez has been.

Liverpool Football Club need to stop permitting the impression to be given they are the real victims here. They did good work with Suarez last season. He got them to the Champions League. He has given them the financial means to replace him. To do that would be cruel. Liverpool always aspire to be more than a club. Prove it now. Forgive him, embrace him and keep working with him.

On Tuesday a fragile man just broke in the industry we all support as fans. He cracked in the pressure cooker we all built. We have created all this for our own entertainment. It’s our fun but it’s Luis Suarez’s existence. He clings onto the life he escaped to, in a wild and primal way. He cracked in the moment against Italy. Can we judge him till we have walked in his shoes? Can we deny that for the past year he has worked hard on himself. He fell back on impulse and hurt himself and his team and his family. He needs support and care, not stone throwers and lame jokes.

If I’d had the money I would have paid FIFA to skew their deliberations in the direction of decent human compassion and not a show trial. But it probably doesn’t work like that with FIFA does it?...
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<wah>

BS

Everybody has pressures and and challenges in life. There are plenty of people with far worse stories that Suarez' and it doesn't excuse biting people because you've lost your head. Suarez needs to man the **** up and take responsibility for his actions, instead of trying to make weak excuses for his unacceptable behaviour ... 'his shoulder collided with my teeth' FFS <doh>
 
PISKIE said:
<wah>

BS

Everybody has pressures and and challenges in life. There are plenty of people with far worse stories that Suarez' and it doesn't excuse biting people because you've lost your head. Suarez needs to man the **** up and take responsibility for his actions, instead of trying to make weak excuses for his unacceptable behaviour ... 'his shoulder collided with my teeth' FFS <doh>
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Nail on head
 
Why didnt Giggs try that one?
"My sister in law's womb collided with my penis"
 
PISKIE said:
<wah>

BS

Everybody has pressures and and challenges in life. There are plenty of people with far worse stories that Suarez' and it doesn't excuse biting people because you've lost your head. Suarez needs to man the **** up and take responsibility for his actions, instead of trying to make weak excuses for his unacceptable behaviour ... 'his shoulder collided with my teeth' FFS <doh>
Click to expand...

Agree with this. However, the same can be said for all that are attempting to take the moral high ground too. Luis bit someone, he didn't murder, rape or brutally beat anyone! Yes, he's a complete **** but he's no worse than a lot of other footballers. His actions are just different to others.
 
Gerrez said:
Agree with this. However, the same can be said for all that are attempting to take the moral high ground too. Luis bit someone, he didn't murder, rape or brutally beat anyone! Yes, he's a complete **** but he's no worse than a lot of other footballers. His actions are just different to others.
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If he did murder, rape or beat someone, people would be a lot more outraged and looking for far more than a longer ban from football though. That would simply be his career over, full stop. And he is a lot worse than almost all footballers in terms of his on field conduct frankly. Its not just that he bit someone, he has one hell of a rap sheet.
 
chelsea - over 100 years of history said:
If he did murder, rape or beat someone, people would be a lot more outraged and looking for far more than a longer ban from football though. That would simply be his career over, full stop. And he is a lot worse than almost all footballers in terms of his on field conduct frankly. Its not just that he bit someone, he has one hell of a rap sheet.
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You mean with other players that have been convicted of ABH, GBH, rape, drink driving (didn't one result in manslaughter?), etc? <laugh>

Obviously, I was exaggerating but the point stands. The reaction is over the top.
 
Gerrez said:
You mean with other players that have been convicted of ABH, GBH, rape, drink driving (didn't one result in manslaughter?), etc? <laugh>

Obviously, I was exaggerating but the point stands. The reaction is over the top.
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I think the reaction as much as anything has come from the sheer and utter disbelief that he would do this for a 3rd time and on such a big stage...over the top or not.

Obviously the guy is hated so people will jump on anything he does but boy he doesn't help himself. His comments (and those of other Uruguayans) post the incident don't help his cause either. Really comes across as a failure to understand what he's done wrong. The fell into his shoulder line was ****ing hilarious too. I can imagine a lot of people caught cheating now using the 'I just fell into her vagina' line to get out of trouble ;)
 
chelsea - over 100 years of history said:
I think the reaction as much as anything has come from the sheer and utter disbelief that he would do this for a 3rd time and on such a big stage...over the top or not.

Obviously the guy is hated so people will jump on anything he does but boy he doesn't help himself. His comments (and those of other Uruguayans) post the incident don't help his cause either. Really comes across as a failure to understand what he's done wrong. The fell into his shoulder line was ****ing hilarious too. I can imagine a lot of people caught cheating now using the 'I just fell into her vagina' line to get out of trouble ;)
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Yep, that was as bad as it gets <laugh>
 
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