Luis Suarez 8-Game Ban: Liverpool Decides Not to Appeal

Liverpool Football Club has decided to accept the Football Association's decision to suspend striker Luis Suarez and will not appeal the matter further.  

In a statement released today, the club continues to reject the conclusion arrived at by the FA's Independent Regulatory Commission (IRC) that Suarez was "probably guilty" of directing racist language towards Manchester United's Patrice Evra.

This, despite the IRC's painstaking presentation of the facts and circumstances giving rise to the conclusion, dismissed by LFC as "highly subjective."

"

It is our strongly held conviction that the Football Association and the panel it selected constructed a highly subjective case against Luis Suarez based on an accusation that was ultimately unsubstantiated.

"

The statement by the club today is consistent in tone and message as the now widely-derided statement released by the club when the findings were first publicized. While support of the player is commendable, the time has come for the club to accept the decision and move on.

It is not enough to pay lip service to the sanction why publicly continuing to gripe about the penalty in the manner that LFC has. It serves no purpose but to undermine the credibility of the club when it calls into question the motives and impartiality of the IRC.

The club's statement accuses the IRC of "consistently and methodically" selecting evidence and disregarding others, in effort to arrive at the "clearly subjective" conclusion that Suarez racially abused Evra,

LFC even more disappointingly diminishes the case presented as a "template in [sic] which a club's rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation."

This would seem to attribute the entire affair to Manchester United's desire to deliberately get Suarez banned. It is important to note that Evra didn't wait until after the match to lob the accusation, neither did he do so immediately after kickoff.  

So when exactly was this conspiracy hatched between Patrice Evra and his employers? Surely, if LFC's message is to be read objectively, the implication is that United sought to eliminate the threat presented by LFC to its title hopes, no?

One wonders why Liverpool and not, say...Manchester City? Couldn't they have hatched a plan against City, or perhaps Chelsea? Or Did Rangers beat United to the punch with the Terry accusations?

If one were to actually read the entire 115-page report with an objective mind, it is difficult to reject the IRC's findings. LFC ignores the objective indicia relied upon by the IRC in substantiating the charges against Suarez.

At its core, yes, this was a case of one man's word against another.  However, the panel looked at video evidence that was not widely available to the public (e.g. footage from foreign broadcasts), which showed different angles of the incident other than the widely disseminated Sky Sports feed.

While the video evidence did not permit for a reading of lips, it showed, among other things, Suarez's facial expression and the fact that he looked Evra up and down before responding to him with a sneer during the main confrontation. It also showed Evra's reaction with shock and dismay to what was said. An elaborate act on his part? Perhaps.

By itself, this is meaningless. Taken in light of the totality of the circumstances (much too detailed to summarize here), however, the clips support the conclusion that something was said sneeringly, to which Evra responded immediately and with dismay.

He also immediately brought it to the attention of the match official, who did not immediately pay attention to what was being said.

The report dispels the widely reported (in some quarters) charge that Evra accused the official of booking him "only because I'm black" (that was actually an accusation made of Evra by Dirk Kuyt). The report also found no substantiation for the charge that Evra directed the term "sudaca" towards Suarez.

Whatever one thinks of the report, one cannot objectively state with any shred of rationality that LFC went about this post-sanction affair in the proper way. The club denounced the panel and its findings without benefit of reading the report, and now dismisses the findings as the product of some conspiracy against LFC.

In the least, the club should have waited until today (after the release of the report) before making any protracted statement. At that point, two options should have been pursued: either a determined resolve to appeal or stoic acceptance of the findings accompanied by a statement of support for the player.

Liverpool, in pursuing neither option, has chosen to circle the proverbial wagons and close ranks around Suarez. In the process, it has ensured that the persecution complex which afflicts so many LFC supporters will continue to be fed, as will the conspiracy theories.