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3 comments

  • Martin Badger

    Mr Evra was called a bad word and ran to the authorities demanding action. Mr Evra is, like most professional footballers, an extremely sensitive man, whose feelings are easily hurt. Mr Evra should realise that this terrible situation could happen again. However, if Mr Evra played all his football in Africa it would be most unlikely to happen again. The reason is that nearly all the players and supporters would be black and therefore very unlikely to abuse him racially. This appalling trauma, for which his gigantic salary cannot possibly compensate him, would never have to be endured again. Why doesn’t Mr Evra take this option?

  • Gid

    Rory Smith is the best young sports journalist in England. His experience of living abroad no doubt helps. Shame he is behind a paywall now but it takes away the only reason to read the paper that employs Ian Herbert and James Lawton which is good.

  • Billy

    Personally I don’t believe this argument is any longer about the ban or the fine imposed upon the player and the club.

    This is now about about a man (Luis Suarez) being stigmatised as a ‘racist’, or at the very least, being capable of using ‘racist language’. An accusation or stigma any self respecting person would not want to be associated with, footballer or otherwise.

    Luis Suarez knows the context in which he said what he said, and siding with John Barnes recent assertions that ‘cultural’ differences’ do matter’, I believe this is the fundamental basis upon which both Luis Suarez and the club are standing up and contesting the FA findings.

    On the basis of the testimonilas provided by the player and the club to the FA enquiry, I ask myself if those same submissions would have been enough for the CPS to have brought a criminal prosecution against Luis Suarez? I doubt it very much!

    With the FA being a complete and utter shambles of an organisation, I feel the club should await the written confirmations on the basis of the findings, and if as suspected, we find ourselves no further down the road to gaining an acceptable explanation as to how they reached their verdict. Then the club and the player should contest the matter on a point of ‘Law’, via the UK civil and/or European courts.

    With Suarez’s name cleared in the civil/European courts, the FA would then be left with no alternative but to rescind their original findings. In short, a reversal of how the FA are handling the John Terry affair. While the 8 game ban could not be reversed once served, the fine (irrelevant) and more importantly the player’s and the clubs integrity could be returned to normal.