I said in the blog I dislike fouls, and I did not like Suarez’s
bite at all. Along with almost all soccer fans. But I must admit that it
bothers me less than cynical kicks of the knee, which shorten a player’s
career, or studs up slides designed to take out the attacking player and
perhaps send him to the hospital. Biting offends us because it breaks the invisible barrier
between persons and leaves the bitten feeling violated—somewhat the way we feel
when someone breaks into our house and we come home to find the door hanging
open. But in truth it does relatively little long-term physical damage.
I remember a match in 2001 in which Roy Keane intentionally
injured the Danish player Håland.
You can see the tackle here.
Keane was apparently taking revenge for an incident three and a half years
earlier, in which Håland had accused Keane of faking an injury. Whatever happened
between them, such actions seem far worse to me than what Suarez did. The ban
on Suarez makes sense to me. The ban on Keane was three games at the time and
five more later when he admitted the act was premeditated, but his action seems
far worse to me than the biting.
Many have suggested that Suarez needs the help of a
therapist. They may well be right. It makes sense to me at least. But I see so
many tackles with studs up, and so many hard jumps into a player (such as the one
that put Neymar out of the cup), and so many intentional kicks of the best
attacking players (such as Brazil’s defense against Rodriguez) that I don’t
understand FIFA’s failure to sanction them equally severely.
So there you have my thoughts, sister mine. Lois tells me
that the world would be a better place if I could run everything, with the
appropriate amount of sarcasm in her voice. She is right of course; I would not
do nearly as well as the officials have. I would add just one thing: use
instant replay with another official monitoring the game. For egregious fouls
that the ref misses (the game is so fast), the replay official could notify the
referee at any time by radio signal to his earphone that the offending player should
be sanctioned at the next break in play. That would have caught Suarez’s bite,
and Robbens’ dive, and the Colombian defender's jump into Neymar, and the Brazilian players' kicks of Rodriguez, and so
on. When fouling costs the team, the players will stop fouling. Not before.
2 comments:
See, I thought that biting was outside the pale of "normal" fouls--and I suspect that is because it crosses some unwritten human taboo. Perhaps too close to cannibalism...hence the taboo.
As for instant replay--oh, I so totally agree. The play-acting (poorly done, I might add) is infuriating to me. So instant replay which would catch missed fouls and timely punish them, as well as ignore phonied up "fouls" and not reward them.
I would add that much of the "acting" is not really acting. If you have ever had someone step on your foot, you know it hurts! It doesn't take much to trip someone running in front of you -- the merest flick of a heel. American Football fans should consider what their game would look like if the players wore as little padding as rugby players do. Rugby! There's a game in which ears are often bitten in the scrum. I heard of an English player who apologized to a French opponent after the game for biting him. The French player replied, "Why apologize? I was biting too!"
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