Yawning gap: Liverpool owner John Henry must act over
misguided support for Luis Suarez
There are larger issues at stake, apparently.
Important points to be made. So Liverpool deigned to do the world a
favour and will not appeal Luis Suarez’s eight-match ban. How
decent of them. Maybe they’ll make a T-shirt telling us all about
it; or a hat. Not a white, pointy one,
obviously.
Want to see a magic trick? Open an American newspaper and
watch your country disappear. Oh, it’s an old joke, but a true one.
I once picked up a copy of USA
Today containing a first person article by Tony Blair. At
the bottom, readers were helpfully informed: ‘Tony Blair is
the British Prime Minister.’ And wasn’t he just, bless
him.
So, until Tuesday, it was almost possible that John Henry,
Tom Werner and the rest of the Fenway Sports Group were unaware of
the damage being done to the image of their club by the fall-out
from the Suarez affair. And then the statement dropped. There, in
the details of the most misjudged public utterance since Tony
Hayward, of British Petroleum, as good as told the oil-clogged
inhabitants of America’s south to give him a break, was a bizarre
digression on the subject of race relations in American
sport.
It had little relevance to the matter in hand and offered
no insight beyond the obvious; but was clearly present at the
request of the owners.
Damage limitation, just in case some of the toxic spill
from Suarez washed up on New England’s shores.
And, like most of Liverpool’s pronouncements since
that fateful day in October, it served only to make matters
worse.
Liverpool will not appeal and Suarez missed his first game
at Manchester City on Tuesday night. Yet, by issuing a strongly
worded statement shortly before the game, Liverpool believed they
had gone out with a bang and a final assault on the credibility of
the Football Association, the process, Manchester United and their
accuser, Patrice Evra. Yet look down and observe the bullet hole in
the foot.
Up to now, the strongest criticism that could be aimed at
Fenway is that they allowed senior football executives at Anfield
too much freedom to handle what was plainly an international affair
with widening ramifications.
From here, however, Liverpool’s owners are culpable.
What were they thinking? This has been a PR disaster, a legal
disaster and a sporting disaster considering an eight-match ban may
have been avoided with greater contrition from the
start.
And Fenway knew all along. Their fingerprints were across
yesterday’s pronouncement, which succeeded in slandering just about
everybody involved in the procedure bar the player who referred to
Evra’s skin colour seven times.
If Fenway remain oblivious to the harm here, they need
telling, and quickly. Letting the football men run the football
club is an admirable stance, but there comes a time when an issue
lies beyond the manager’s call. Whoever was left to
mastermind Liverpool’s stance over Suarez has been proven horribly
inept in this arena.
It is surely no coincidence that Liverpool recently
dispensed with Paul Tyrrell, their widely respected head of
communications. In his absence, the club’s actions have drawn
universal condemnation on a par with Carlos Tevez’s walk-out at
Manchester City.
What's the score? A fan gets a pointed message across
at the Etihad Stadium
More harmfully, the blinkered protestations of some
supporters are increasingly perceived as the position of
Liverpool’s senior executive. Tuesday’s statement, despite its late
grab for the moral high ground, did nothing to dispel that damning
perception.
The production of a 115-page report which metaphorically
took Liverpool’s case out at the knee was the only possible
response to the aggressive campaign mounted by the club following
Suarez’s eight-game ban.
Any impartial reading of the exhaustive detail therein
would note its thoroughness. Picking at its weaknesses is an
easy game when there is so much information to inspect.
Had the FA released a one- paragraph judgment and
punishment, the lawyers — the qualified and those self-deluding
amateurs — would have had nothing with which to work.
The more detailed the findings, the more chance there is
of unearthing an arguable point. It is not an edifying spectacle,
though, this use of technicalities to cloud such a serious
issue.
Raking over familiar ground will merely alienate Liverpool
further from all but their most myopic devotees.
Flashpoint: Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra clash at
Anfield
Where is Henry in all this? Where has he been, where is he
now? The longer he procrastinated the more firmly his club became
aligned with the most extreme cases of denial emanating from
Merseyside. And now this.
For a man supposedly so aware of racial issues in sport
and beyond, Henry has not emerged well. Many days ago he should
have ended the unholy mess with a transatlantic telephone call that
ordered his club to accept the verdict, issue an apology and try to
retrieve a shard of respectability from the wreckage.
If he thought such interference would have undermined
his manager, he could have made it the player’s decision,
announcing that Suarez has asked the club not to appeal. It would
have been a small step but at least it would have placed him on the
road to rehabilitation.
Instead, Suarez put out a statement on Tuesday night,
which included the remarkable assertion: ‘I will carry out the
suspension with the resignation of someone who hasn’t done anything
wrong.’
So if he was found innocent, he would have been innocent;
but if guilty, he is innocent, still. At the outset Suarez said the
verdict would decide which of the parties had to apologise.
Apparently, like much of the evidence, that stance has since
changed.
Flat out: Suarez claims he will serve his ban 'with the
resignation of someone who hasn¿t done anything wrong
At the very least, Henry has been poorly counselled. One
cannot imagine such a sore being allowed to fester and grow at the
Boston Red Sox, his Major League Baseball franchise.
Henry did not switch sports and continents, he did not buy
Liverpool to consolidate its popularity among Liverpudlians. A
euphoric Kop singing You’ll Never
Walk Alone is only half the story. Henry’s eye was on the
bigger picture, the wider world, where Liverpool’s history and
traditions had enduring appeal.
It is this reputation, and his own, that is being
surrendered, line by ghosted line, over Suarez.
The reason the Suarez decision carried such impact was
that it was plainly not taken lightly. The Football Association
should be commended for this, because the reaction to the police
charge laid against John Terry shows few have the patience to wait
for a verdict any more.
Terry’s first court hearing is scheduled for February 1,
yet there have been repeated calls for him to pre-empt this by
standing down as England captain, insinuations that his defence is
flawed, while The Guardian
placed him in a jokey list of those who had ‘ruined 2011’ and
failed their ‘diversity awareness test’ along with John Galliano
(found guilty of racism), Suarez (found guilty of racism) and the
outspoken #tramlady (arrested, awaiting trial, video available
on YouTube, see
for yourself).
