Liverpool: Luis Suarez - The World Class Headache
After all the dust settled after another heated Liverpool v Chelsea affair, every man and his dog was left speaking yet again about one man. Since moving over to this country, Luis Suarez has always been the centre of media attention. Sadly for Liverpool Football Club, it has normally been for the wrong reasons. You cannot deny the unprecedented talent that he possesses, but what comes with it is another story. Suarez himself, in a recent interview with The Times, was quoted as saying that he needed to control his behaviour more after his wife threatened to stop coming to support him. We can all see that if got off to such a wonderful start then. The hardest thing to believe is that this is not actually the first time Suarez has resorted to biting an opponent during a football match. His first bite, against PSV in a Dutch League game, brought about a 7 match domestic ban, a 2 match club ban and the heaviest fine that Ajax could throw at him. He was nicknamed The Ajax Cannibal from then on. However, as most Liverpool fans will now be doing, Ajax fans always seemed to leap to the defence of a player they idolised and loved for his ability with a ball at his feet. One of the real questions being: Does his abundance of talents outweigh his volatile behaviour? This season alone, Luis Suarez has netted 30 goals in an impressive 44 outings for the club on Merseyside. He is one of the frontrunners in the race for the Player of the Year award, and also leads the race for the Golden Boot. Not bad for a team currently lying in seventh place then. Up until January, Suarez was Liverpools only recognisable striker and carried the whole weight of the team on his shoulders. This season was going to go down as one of the best, if not the best, in the strikers career, but yet again it will be marred by an act of such idiocy that people have labelled it indefensible. Bad challenges, violence, spitting and even racism have been defended in the past (notably for Suarez again with the Evra debacle) but this latest act seems to be the last nail in the coffin for a lot of people. Brendan Rodgers has not leapt to the defence of the player, but has described his actions as unacceptable and has said he will be having a quiet word with the player. It has surfaced today that Liverpool Football Club has fined Suarez the maximum amount for his actions, but also reiterated the fact that the player will not be sold in the forthcoming transfer window. It seems maybe this time then, that Liverpool players will not search through their wardrobes for those infamous Suarez t-shirts and in fact all join together to sort this player out once and for all. Yes, the player is damaging the reputation of the club, but so is the lack of Champions League football. Fans are not naïve enough to celebrate Suarezs actions, but they also realise how important he is to return Liverpool to where they want, and deserve, to be. There will be plenty of media hammering to be done, and also plenty of games for Suarez to sit out it seems, but when the impending ban is over, lets hope he dons the famous shirt again and maybe this time, proves the doubters wrong.