The Barcelona striker’s international ban ends with a return to Brazil for Friday’s World Cup qualifier where he rejoins a team already on the up and confident he has put past misdeeds behind himFrom a narrative point of view,it would have been better if Uruguay had been struggling in World Cup qualification. It is appropriate that Luis Suárez’s return after his ban for biting Giorgio Chiellini during the World Cup in Brazil should advance in a World Cup qualifier in Brazil, on Friday, and but a sense of drama demands that he should be riding buck-toothed over the horizon to drag Uruguay from a position of hopelessness to qualification for Russia. As it is,he returns to a Uruguay side that are actually in pretty fine shape.
There has been nearly nothing approximately Suárez’s absence from international football that has not been absurd. His offence was absurd: a man biting another man in front of a live audience of 40000 while millions of others watched on television. His sentence was absurd – nine competitive international games, amounting to 21 months, and when you could demolish someone’s leg with a callous tackle and gather away with a week’s suspension. And the Uruguayan response that weirdly cast the whole episode as an English-media conspiracy (still being pursued in El Pais this week) was absurd. As ever,the basic rule remains: if you don’t want people to talk approximately you biting Giorgio Chiellini, don’t bite Giorgio Chiellini.
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Source: theguardian.com