Demonising Luis Suarez is ultimately irrelevant and futile. This, the third of his biting offences, shows that in his present pathological state, he’s incurable. A classical recidivist. Meaning someone who will commit the same offence time and again, irrationally and instinctively.
Look at the bare facts. Biting Giorgio Chiellini was an act of suicidal stupidity besides being vicious. An instant’s reflection would surely have told Suarez that with television cameras on any and every incident in these World Cup matches, his sin would inevitably find him out.
Ban him for as long as you like, it will provide no cure. He plainly needs prolonged psychiatric treatment, though in the success obsessed, unsophisticated football world, I don’t suppose that he is going to get it.
So inevitably he will bit again, be damned again, suspended and fined again, yet play again for clubs and country who need his goals more than they care for his redemption.
Sad that so vibrant, dramatic and surprising a World Cup tournament should coincide with ever more scandalous and depressing stories of the corruption of FIFA.
Now the Sunday Times have told us, still examining the multiplicity of emails and the like, that numerous members of the FIFA executive committee have been in receipt of huge cash bonuses.
A clear invitation and readily taken, it seems, to dance to the tune of those who distribute such bonuses. Some of them $200,000 dollars at a time. The names now given are, so significantly, of representatives of countries whose national teams are almost invisible to the public eye.People whose membership of the powerful executive committee seems astonishing and inexplicable.
So who are these football nonentities pocketing such gigantic bonuses? Kalusha Bwalya of the Zambian FA got $70,000, Viphet Sihachakr President of Laos FA $100,000, Ganesh Thapa of the Nepal FA $115,000 and so the dismal list goes on, all beneficiaries of Blatter’s largesse – FIFA having smoothly altered procedures when the previous bonus system was briefly forbidden.
The only name on the list which dismays and surprises me is that of Liberia’s George Weah, who was once voted Footballer of the Year, a superb attacker who scored a memorable solo goal once for Milan and even once paid the whole expenses of the Liberian international team when they had to play abroad and the incumbents of the Liberian FA had stolen all the money.
I knew liked and much admired Weah as footballer and person; but now? He had always seemed such a beacon of integrity but it transpires that he was on very friendly terms with Bin Hammam; who himself drew cast sums from FIFA before he was forced out when caught red handed trying to bribe Caribbean representatives.
Before I hear cries of “Racism?” from the usual suspects, let me make clear at once that race and colour have nothing to do with the case. It is notable that the powerful likes of Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Senegal and Ghana do not figure on the sordid list.
