If I were to rob the most heavily guarded bank in Switzerland, I wouldn’t pick Luis Suarez to be on my team. He has the courage, but he would spoil the plan, bite the tellers, thrash around on the floor and throw our operation into disarray. Sinking his teeth into an Italian defender, Suarez was slapped with a four-month ban, starting from the match between his Uruguay and Colombia. He’s forbidden even from entering the football stadium. It’s a provisional excommunication, a Fifa coup de grace.
This is the third time Suarez has bitten an opponent; the striker has earned the label of serial biter. He clearly broke the rules, for football is played with feet, not teeth, and while there is petulant behaviour on the pitch everywhere, his unprovoked chomping on the walking pasta goes beyond gamesmanship into malice. Had he done it on a street, he could be charged with physical assault. In short, what he did was hard to defend in a world watched by a thousand cameras, and yet there are people who staunchly defend him. The whole saga, they say, is “a conspiracy”. There’s talk of “photoshopped evidence”, and of European powerhouses’ witch hunt against one of the world’s top players. Even Uruguay’s president argued in defence of him, in somewhat convoluted logic. In Suarez’s home country, that seems to be the narrative: The world, especially the rich and the powerful part, has conspired against Uruguay.
Luckily, I still haven’t seen a campaign from Uruguay to ban EU products or stop travelling to Switzerland, home of Fifa. I could imagine the headline “Support Suarez, Boycott the World” — just like some of us here calling for a boycott of European goods after it meted out (a mild) punishment against our junta. I could imagine the catalogue of excuses: What the man did was madness, but justified madness. The world doesn’t understand our culture, because we’re unique. What he did wasn’t a coup, just a temporary measure to ensure victory. To break the rules — or what’s agreed upon as an international rule — is an internal affair foreign nations shouldn’t stick their ugly noses in. Fifa (or the UN or the EU) isn’t our father, as someone infamously said before he was red-carded.
Of course the Uruguayan apologists haven’t gone that far, which is good. Still, it’s apologia all the same, and the wave of resistance and the contrivances to turn what’s plainly unacceptable into a case of exceptionalism smacks of the situation here, outside the football arena. Defending Suarez is difficult — it’s the third time he did it, just like the 19th time we’ve had a coup — and while the hypocritical nature of the international powers-that-be is beyond dispute, it’s ludicrous to put yourself on a self-made nationalist pedestal. It’s just not possible to cut yourself off from the reality that football is still played with feet, not teeth, and that no military junta has ever earned the world’s official trophy.
If I were to rob a Swiss bank full of Nazi gold, I wouldn’t pick Luis Suarez for my team. But the irony is this: most Latin American footballers want to rob European banks, because that’s where the gold is. Suarez has actually done it quite well. There are fine players in Uruguay, Argentina or Brazil who’re content with playing in their domestic leagues, but to join top-flight European clubs is the dream of a few thousand young men on that continent, even on our continent. This post-colonial dilemma covers the gamut of economic to political and footballing practices: to beat them, to rob them, to prove that you don’t care about their preaching, first you have to join them. First you have to play by their rules.
Arrogance is useful only when it produces results, not when it’s an empty show.
Our brouhaha about boycotting EU products and the simmering anti-US sentiment — a form of political expression, granted — reek of childish incomprehension of how the world works. We were never colonised, the textbooks keep reminding us, but the post-colonial mentality applies here too, because we’re torn between the need to be approved of and our disgust against the superpowers that keep lecturing us despite their own sordid backyard. The EU’s exports to Thailand account for only 1% of its total exports, so our passionate rush to defend the coup, which is as hard to defend as Suarez’s nibble, has made our arrogance look like a fool’s show.
To beat them, too bad, you have to join them. Uruguay can do that by beating everyone in the conspiracy to win the Cup — that would make Fifa blush — and I’m sure that’s what they intend to do. Likewise, we have no choice but to do same, as quickly as possible, starting with learning to play by the rules. In the 21st century, serial coup-making is just as bad as serial biting, and the scars cut deeper.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.