Luis Suarez of Uruguay comes to grips with Giorgio Chiellini of Italy during the Confederations Cup clash in Salvador, Brazil last year. Photo: Claudio Villa/Getty
To get a sense of just how protective they are towards Luis Suarez in his native Uruguay consider the case of Ricardo Gabito, an investigative journalist in that country.
He was shot in December 2003 at the behest of a local underage football official after reporting an attempt to pressure a referee into changing his report of a match in which the then 16-year-old Suarez head-butted the referee after being sent off.
Gabito recalled the incident to reporter Wright Thompson for a fine ESPN piece recently but went on to add that Suarez is now his favourite player.
Nobody suggests that the Liverpool striker had the slightest bit of responsibility for the shooting, just the head-butt, but Gabito might be expected to be a less supportive of a player whose actions gave rise to such remarkable consequences. Not a bit of it, he says. The Uruguayan reporter says he came from the same sort of poverty as the striker and understands the desperate fear of a reversal in fortunes.
Latest incident
“He bites (the piece was written well before this latest incident but, perhaps, like the various Swedes reported yesterday to have backed Suarez to bite someone at this World Cup at 175-1, its author had a hunch) because he is clinging to a new life,” as Thompson puts it, “terrified of being sucked back into the one he left behind.”
“Soccer was a vehicle for him to be saved,” says Gabilto. “He clung to that, as if to say, ‘This is where either I’ll be saved or I will sink’. On the field, I would have done the same thing as he did. To overcome and not surrender.”
The views of those within the game can also be ambivalent to such things. In this instance, Suarez’s team back then, Nacional, were going well in the league, there were records and titles at stake. The primary concern of Nelson Spillman, the official who hired the hitman (and who later, with his brother Daniel, went to jail for his trouble) was simply to ensure the player was available for the last game of the season.
The culprit
In rather more run-of-the -mill circumstances, Zinedine Zidane’s early prospects were boosted not blown when he took his time after being fouled badly in an underage club game before walking the width of the pitch, locating the culprit, laying a hand on each of his shoulders and head-butting him.
Far from being horrified, the scout who was there to watch him that day was reassured that, having previously seemed a little too timid, the teenage prospect was capable of standing up for himself physically.
Now, Suarez’s actions seem set once again to ensure that he will be remembered more for his moments of madness than for his sparkling skill. It is a little reminiscent of the sensational case at the other end of Zidane’s career, the head-butt on Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final.
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1mtSGsE
0 comments:
Post a Comment