Luis Suarez discussed his biting incidents ahead of El Classico this weekend…
Controversial Barcelona striker Luis Suarez has claimed that ‘biting is relatively harmless’. The former Liverpool man has been involved in three such incidents in his career, the most recent of which came at this summer’s World Cup.
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Reports in the Guardian include extracts from Suarez’s new book – Crossing The Line: My Story – in which he explains what drives him to bite and why he’s not sure he wants to be cured.
“I knew straight away, as soon as it happened,” Suarez said of his clash with Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini. “I had let people down. My coach Oscar Tabarez was in a bad way in the dressing room. I couldn’t look at my team-mates. I didn’t know how I could say sorry to them.
“He told me that journalists had asked him about the incident,” Suarez revealed. “He’d told them that he hadn’t seen anything. My team-mates were trying to tell me that maybe the situation was not so bad. But I didn’t want to hear a single word of it. Two more days would pass before I had to leave Brazil, but in my head I was already gone.
“I was at training the next day, still in this unconscious state of denial. Just as we finished the session, the Maestro called me over. He had news: ‘This is the worst thing that I have ever had to tell a player.’ At that moment, I thought maybe the ban would be 10, 15 or even 20 games, but then he said, ‘Nine matches.’
“That didn’t seem any worse than I had feared. But he wasn’t finished: “And you can’t set foot in any stadium. You have to leave now. You can’t be anywhere near the squad.
“I wanted to stay and support my team-mates. You could see that emotionally the team had died. They were sunk. Even if I was not playing, I wanted to try to make up for things in some small way. But the team manager, Eduardo Belza, had been informed that I had to leave the squad as soon as possible.”
After discussing another clash, with Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic, he added: “I know biting appals a lot of people, but it’s relatively harmless. Or at least it was in the incidents I was involved in. When Ivanovic rolled up his sleeve to show the referee the mark at Anfield, there was virtually nothing there.”
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