I'm not calling you a liar

It seems as though Luis Suarez has been giving interviews this week.  And it seems that finally Liverpool have found the best way to rehabilitate him in the eyes of the world - put him in front of a load of football journalists and a big tin of whitewash and let them tell us all what a lovely guy he is.

Here's three interviews from today, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent.  The Independent just completely ignore the Evra case and subsequent verdict and suspension.  The Telegraph claim, a little bizarrely, that:

Suárez’s capacity to divide can be traced well beyond last year’s eight-game ban, but the extremities on both sides of that insidious case created a new pantomime villain for the Premier League.

Which is just a way to try and diminish the Evra case and subsequent verdict and suspension, "well, he's always been one of those players who you either love or hate, like all football geniuses, and everyone likes a good boo, just look at Ronaldo," a reading compounded later in the piece:

Football’s redemptive qualities are such that Suárez can win hearts and minds off the pitch by creating moments of divine pleasure on it.

The problem being that he's not actually in the same league as the true geniuses of the game.  We don't hate him because of his genius, but because he's a lying, diving cheat.

The worst offender though is Sid Lowe in The Guardian piece, who writes, after a load of hyperbole about what a misunderstood genius he is and how hard it was on the streets and how he's not looking for sympathy (though Sid will shovel it into the article anyway, the little sweetheart), this:

The word negro in Spanish does not mean "negro", and certainly does not mean the other n-word. In Uruguay, it is a word so widely used as to often be little more than mate. "In Spanish, in Latin America, there's a way of speaking that is totally different. There are words you can say here that you could not say there and vice-versa. They would be taken in a totally different way," says Suárez. But perhaps that is not even the point given that after three days of video evidence at a three-man Independent Regulatory Commission, lip readers produced no hard evidence that he said what he was accused of saying.

Which, to paraphrase, says "the word wasn't insulting, and anyway, there's no video evidence he said it."  Which for the hard of memory is absolute rubbish.  We don't have to run over the whole case again, extracts from the report are here, all we need to say is that Suarez admitted saying the word, so why is Sid Lowe whining about video evidence?  The Commission found his evidence unreliable.  And the fact that the whole thing was in the context of an argument, rather than a friendly conversation, changes it from the friendly version Sid would like to propagate - even though there's no video evidence that he even said the word, though if he did, it would, undoubtedly, have been friendly, like the pat on the head that he gave Evra.  He's definitely not a racist though.  Or a liar.  Or a diving cheat.

Well done the Guardian, looking forward to next week when Sid Lowe interviews John Terry and discovers what a thoroughly decent chap he is, and there's no video evidence of him shagging Wayne Bridges' girlfriend so he can't have done it.