By Mike CollettFrom Stuff.co.nz

Uruguay will decide in coming hours whether to appeal Fifa’s ruling, local media reported.

Suarez was also suspended from any football-related activity for four months and fined 100,000 Swiss francs (NZ$127,000), football’s world governing body said in a statement.

“Such behaviour cannot be tolerated on any football pitch, and in particular not at a FIFA World Cup when the eyes of millions of people are on the stars on the field,” Claudio Sulser, chairman of the FIFA Disciplinary Committee, said in a statement.

“The Disciplinary Committee took into account all the factors of the case and the degree of Mr Suarez’s guilt in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Code. The decision comes into force as soon it is communicated.”

Suarez will miss Uruguay’s last-16 match against Colombia in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday (Sunday NZ time) and will play no further part in the tournament in Brazil if they progress.

He missed the first match of the tournament due to injury but returned to score twice in Uruguay’s 2-1 win over England.

Suarez will not be able to train or attend matches with his English club Liverpool until late October, meaning he will miss at least nine Premier League games and the start of their Champions League campaign.

“Liverpool Football Club will wait until we have seen and had time to review the Fifa Disciplinary Committee report before making any further comment,” Liverpool chief executive officer Ian Ayre said on the club’s website.

RECORD BAN

Suarez can appeal against the ban, the longest Fifa has imposed for an offence at a World Cup, but it would remain in place while any appeal was heard, said a Fifa spokeswoman.

The previous record ban was eight games on Italy’s Mauro Tassotti for breaking the nose of Spain’s Luis Enrique in 1994

The 27-year-old Suarez, voted England’s Footballer of the Year after scoring 31 league goals for Liverpool last season, has now been involved in three incidents of biting opponents.

He was also banned for one match at the last World Cup in South Africa for a deliberate handball that cost Ghana a match-winning goal in a quarter-final.

The latest biting incident occurred 10 minutes from the end of their final Group D match shortly before Diego Godin scored to give the South American champions a 1-0 win to seal Uruguay’s progression and Italy’s elimination from the tournament.

Suarez clashed with Giorgio Chiellini who furiously pulled open his shirt to show the mark to the referee, Mexican Marco Rodriquez, who took no action.

Reuters photographs show what Fifa’s Disciplinary Committee accepted were bite marks on Chiellini’s shoulder and pictures also showed Suarez sitting on the ground holding his teeth immediately after the incident.

For more on this story go to: http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/football/10205507/Suarez-banned-nine-matches-for-bite

Related stories:

World Cup 2014: So why is Luis Suarez a biter?

From The Canberra Times

Luis Suarez, who has made World Cup headlines for the wrong reasons, has a history of biting his opponents. Does his habit have a Freudian explanation? Harry Wallop reports from London.

It was a moment of madness that not only managed to distract fans from England’s dismal exit from the World Cup, but also put the tournament on front pages around the world for the wrong reasons: “Jaws III” ran one headline, while “Chow Baby” was the caption in the New York Daily News, not a publication usually interested in the beautiful game.

Luis Suarez, tipped to be one of the stars of the football festival in Brazil, the dazzling Liverpool striker who had already ended England’s dreams, sank his teeth into the shoulder of his Italian opponent Giorgio Chiellini and provided the 2014 World Cup with its arch villain.

This is far from the first time that the World Cup has been marred by disturbing violence on the pitch. In the 1982 semi-final between West Germany and France, the French striker Patrick Battiston, about to slot home a winner, was barged with such force by Harald Schumacher, the German goalkeeper, that his vertebrae were damaged and he later slipped into a coma. Then there was the final in 2006, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi like a bull attacking a matador.

What made Suarez’s attack so shocking was not just his play-acting afterwards – he fell to the ground clutching his mouth as if he were the victim (he has denied the incident and claims Chiellini “bumped into me with his shoulder”) – it was that this is the third time in a high-profile match that the Uruguayan has used his mouth as a weapon.

It might be thought that he had learnt his lesson from previous lengthy match bans, or at least some techniques for self-control from the anger management course he attended after the last attack, on the Chelsea player Branislav Ivanovic. All of which might make him an interesting subject for study to a criminologist.

Prof David Wilson, at Birmingham City University, jokes (though only slightly) that Suarez’s behaviour is certainly worthy of his attention: “He first bit in November 2010, when he was playing for Ajax, and then he bit again when he was playing for Liverpool against Chelsea last year. The gap between his first and second incidents was 28 months, and the gap between the second and third incidents is 15 months. If I had my criminological hat on, I would expect the gap between this week’s biting and the next incident to be even shorter.”

Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini shows off bite marks on his shoulder.

Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini shows off bite marks on his shoulder. Photo: Reuters

That, of course, may not be possible if Fifa imposes the maximum 24-month or 24-match ban. Football’s ruling body is still investigating the incident.

Suarez may not be found to have committed an offence. But it is clear that the sight of an adult biting another in public is much more disturbing than throwing a punch, even if both might be criminal assault. Dr Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University, says: “How many times in football have we seen fisticuffs, elbowing, even headbutting? All these things are awful, but they have become almost part and parcel of the game. But biting is so rare, that is one of the reasons why it is so shocking.”

Also, psychologists explain, biting shocks us because it involves using an intimate and soft body part that one normally associates with pleasure. And here we touch on a basic tenet of Freudianism. According to the founding father of psychoanalysis, all sexual pleasure and anxieties are rooted in different periods of childhood, the first of which is the oral stage, when babies explore the world through their mouths. Toddlers often then go on to bite to attract attention and will continue doing so until a parent teaches them otherwise.

Behaviour learnt in the oral stage of development is the explanation, Freudians believe, for everything from a predilection for chewing pencils all the way to full-blown vampirism. It is no coincidence that Freud wrote his seminal work on psychosexual theories within a decade of the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire, spreading fear in a sexually repressed society, is a powerful metaphor. And the genre has never been out of fashion for long, with vampires finding a new lease of life (in a watered-down form) in the Twilight saga.

Nowhere is the line between pleasure and pain so blurred as with biting. As with all sexual practices, there is a technical term available: obtaining pleasure from biting or being bitten is called odaxelagnia. This is an act that happens between two consenting adults, often teenagers experimenting with “love bites”. It becomes more problematic when one half of the couple has no say in the matter.

Dr Michael Bloomfield, clinical research fellow at Imperial College London, says: “Biting is about putting a part of someone else’s body into your mouth, and is cannibalistic. That is not to say that everyone who bites is a cannibal, but on a deeper, psychological level it is about cannibalism, and that is why we find it so shocking. If we were to rank it among all the crimes, cannibalism is about as big a no-no as possible.”

Suarez may have a chronic problem with biting, but he is not the first sportsman to use the tactic, either to intimidate an opponent or simply because they have lost their temper. The most famous example is Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield’s ear midway through a boxing match in 1997, causing blood to spurt and the commentator to say, in an unintentionally comic way, “that’s nasty stuff there; it looks to be almost a fight”.

There have been high-profile cases in rugby, too. South Africa prop Johan le Roux was sent home from a tour of New Zealand in 1994 after being found guilty of biting the ear of an opponent. More recently, England rugby player Dylan Hartley was suspended for eight weeks for biting the Ireland player Stephen Ferris during a Six Nations match.

In rugby, biting seems slightly less horrific because of the nature of the scrum, with people’s heads frequently shoved up against opponents’ bodies, suggesting less premeditation is required for a bite. But in football there is no reason why your mouth should be close to an opponent. “To bite someone, you have to get very close, you have to put your head – the place you want to protect the most in a conflict – right up against them,” says Prof Wilson.

“Think about what this does. It literally marks your partner as belonging to you. In evolutionary terms, there are many animals who bite their mates as a way of controlling them before engaging with them sexually.”

Try as we might, it is hard to escape the sexual nature of biting. It is sometimes even used as a method of attack during sexual crimes, Prof Wilson says. “It is nearly always a form of sadism. Often I’d be looking at children who had been bitten by a paedophile or women who had been bitten on their sexual organs. I really don’t want to over-egg it, but Suarez has a mild psychological issue.”

That may be true. He certainly has some problems, possibly the biggest of which is that he is in denial that he has done anything wrong, and is behaving once again like an overgrown toddler.

Dr Saima Latif, a psychologist, says: “Trying to shift the blame is also a classic form of childish behaviour. Most children, when they are confronted with something they have done, will immediately recourse to lying.”

The reason for this, say experts, is because his footballing parent-figures – whether for club or country – have always refused to castigate his bad behaviour, giving him licence to transgress time after time.

Fifa has the power to send Suarez to the naughty step, but he probably needs to spend some time under treatment before he can return to the playground. As Dr Latif says: “To get to the root of the problem and address it effectively, he requires psychological therapy.”

PHOTOS:

Serial bitter: Luis Suarez faces a lengthy ban if found guilty. Photo: Reuters

Suarez bite: Giorgio Chiellini reveals teeth marks on his shoulder. Photo: Reuters

Luis Suarez denies biting Italian Giorgio Chiellini. Photo: AP

The Telegraph, London

For more on this story and to see the video go to: http://www.smh.com.au/fifa-world-cup-2014/world-cup-news-2014/world-cup-2014-so-why-is-luis-suarez-a-biter-20140626-zsm6s.html#ixzz35kqyN67B

Did Luis Suarez try to bite the same Italian player last year?

By Chris Taylor From Mashable

As if the story of Uruguay’s Luis Suarez biting Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini during Tuesday’s World Cup match couldn’t get any stranger, it seems this isn’t just an act for which Suarez has been punished before — it may not even be the first time Suarez attempted to bite the exact same player.

Photos and videos of this prior incident have emerged from the FIFA Confederations Cup, also held in Brazil, almost exactly a year ago on June 30, 2013. Again, Italy played Uruguay, this time in the third-place match.

At one point in the match, shown in the above photo, Suarez was chasing the ball in front of the Italian goal, then grabbed Chiellini, and appears to be ready to sink his teeth into the Italian’s right shoulder.

To watch video of the incident go to link below. The attempted bite — if that’s what it is — happens in the very first second:

The evidence is inconclusive, but it seems Suarez may have attempted a bite, but didn’t quite connect. Certainly, Chiellini wasn’t protesting as violently as he did during the World Cup match, when he bared his shoulder for all to see the bite mark.

Suarez has been punished for two other biting incidents — one at Ajax, for which he received a 7-match ban, and one at Liverpool for which he received a 10-match ban.

FIFA’s disciplinary committee is currently conducting an investigation into the incident during Tuesday’s game, and is expected to announce its result before Saturday, when Uruguay play Colombia [EDITOR: Has been announced see story at top]

IMAGE: Luis Suarez appears to attempt to chomp down on Giorgio Chiellini during the FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil 2013 3rd Place match between Uruguay and Italy on June 30, 2013 in Salvador, Brazil. IMAGE: CLAUDIO VILLA

For more on this story and to see the video go to: http://mashable.com/2014/06/25/suarez-bit-chiellini-before/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher