On Suarez, F1 & Soccer…
A somewhat ironically timed quote below from Ian Bogost, which I came across after watching the Uruguay/Ghana game last night. Opinion amongst people I’ve spoken to / read since last night has varied, from calling for Suarez to be banned for 10 games to saying what he did is what you’d expect any professional to do in the circumstances.
What caught my attention was the similarity in many ways with the Ferrari / Hamilton situation from last weekend. To recap, Hamilton illegally passed the safety car, whilst the Ferraris lined up behind it. By the time the stewards issued their penalty (a drive-through for Hamilton), he had pulled so far ahead of the Ferraris that he was able to maintain his lead over them and finish on the podium, where as Alonso languished in 8th.
The Ferrari argument, which the FIA reject, is that Hamilton effectively gained an advantage by breaking the rules, and that he should have been further punished so his advantage was lost. In the Suarez case, he stopped a definite goal, giving Uruguay a chance to stay alive which they did when Ghana missed the penalty, Suarez today called it the new “Hand of God”, showing no regret at all.
What is fair in such cases will be a topic that is sure to be of future debate, but for any one event all you can do is enforce the rules, and both the FIA and the referee last night did that. As for the quote from Bogost, well, suffice to say I don’t really agree with his analogy.
Perhaps this is one reason why Americans dislike soccer so much: we are obsessed with fairness and transcendental truth, while football shows us that the universe is cruel not (just) through God’s will, but because so many factors come into play all at once that it’s impossible to account for them all. Perhaps this explanation also meshes well with football’s popularity in the developing world. In some situations, you can do everything right, and you still can get screwed.
