Liverpool striker committed the ultimate sin when he sank his teeth into Chelsea’s defender Branislav Ivanovic

We have all at some stage forgotten to empty the bread bin when we went on holiday, or left a pear in the fruit bowl, and returned to discover a repulsive mass of mould. Fridges help to delay this process by keeping food cold and dry, but imagine instead placing your comestibles in a warm, damp place, deliberately mushing them up and then leaving them to fester. A bacterium could hardly imagine a finer breeding ground. Imagine what vile horrors would swiftly grow within. This is the mouth.

Now imagine a colourless liquid that contains the very essence of you. Not just DNA, but enough information to detect things as varied as diabetes, allergies, recreational drug use and HIV, as well as strong doses of sex hormones and between 10 and 100 million bacteria per millilitre. This is saliva.

It’s not surprising that we find mouths, handy as they are for communicating and consuming, a bit odd. Unpleasant even. Sport has a very British attitude to the mouth. It is to be used for calling the toss, and then closed. You may run and jump, throw and catch, kick and punch, you may even hit things with sticks or shoot them with arrows and bullets, but bare your teeth and you’re in trouble.

Of course greater injury can be inflicted using a booted foot than even the most savage mouth, and very frequently is. But mouth-attacks still carry a particular resonance. As Frank Rijkaard, author of football’s most notorious incident, will attest, they are remembered when the casually cracked fibula is forgotten, and punished with a vigour forgotten when more genuinely harmful assaults are committed.

This year the Irish prop Cian Healy was banned for three convenient weeks for stamping on England’s Dan Cole in the Six Nations match at the Aviva Stadium in an apparently deliberate attempt to cause injury; when the Stade Français halfback Jerome Fillol spat at Bath’s Peter Stringer a few weeks later no injury was possible, but his ban will last for 14 weeks.

Aim a kick or a punch at a rival and you will be criticised for your violence; aim your saliva at them and the backlash will be worse. Two examples from late2004 illustrate the point. In one, Manchester United’s Ruud Van Nistelrooy attacked Arsenal’s Ashley Cole with his studs, in the other Bolton’s El Hadji Diouf spat at Portsmouth’s Arjan de Zeeuw.

Van Nistelrooy got a three-week ban but also the support of his club, and said in a statement that “there was no deliberate attempt to harm”. Diouf got a three-week ban and a two-week fine, was condemned by his manager and said in a statement that “my behaviour showed a lack of moral responsibility”. Arsène Wenger said Van Nistelrooy was “silly”; Gary Speed, who played with Diouf at Bolton at the time, described spitting as “probably the worst thing that can happen to you”.

If attempts to injure are bad and saliva is worse, attempts to injure that involve saliva are the perfect storm of evil. Biting is normally the preserve of morally confused infants, and though footballers are prone to the occasional exhibition of juvenile idiocy, this is a level to which they are normally unwilling to stoop. But no blood was drawn by Luis Suárez on Sunday; Branislav Ivanovic’s immediate reaction seemed to be astonishment, rather than agony.

Already the Uruguayan has been fined, offered anger-management counselling, condemned by his club and forced to issue a public apology, and the FA looks set to act next. When Wigan’s Callum McManaman all-but amputated Massadio Haidara’s leg in March he met none of those fates. Why is it that football’s disciplinarians only bared their teeth after a footballer did the same?

Perhaps we need to rethink where spitting and biting dispassionately deserve to be placed on sport’s crime sheet. Without wishing to exonerate him, Suárez’s actions were neither massively violent nor necessarily evil, and something about his ongoing demonisation sticks in the craw.

His biting certainly seemed extremely weird, but can the same not be said of our approach to the mouth?

A news article on 2013-04-22 14:23:00 from: The Guardian

Read the full article here.

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