The face of Uruguay striker Luis Suarez has become well-known to every single person in Italy as indignation for him biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini in Uruguay's 1-0 win at the World Cup earlier this week has come full circle in the country.

On Friday, a day after Suarez was banned by FIFA for nine international matches and suspended from all football activity for four months, his teeth - often portrayed in the caricature of a vampire or monster - were still hitting the headlines of national newspapers.

Fans and even citizens who had never followed football before were the first to flood social networks with thousands of harsh comments against Suarez on Tuesday, when TV replays showed him sink his teeth into Chiellini's shoulder shortly before Uruguay scored the goal which sent Italy home.

In the following days, it was the turn of the Italian press which was furious at the referee for missing the biting incident, which many said could be expected as the striker was no stranger to similar offences.

Suarez had been already banned for 10 games last year after biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic and in 2010 he had been suspended for seven games for also snapping at PSV Eindhoven's Otman Bakkal.

Most of the citizens questioned by the web TV of Corriere della Sera, the newspaper with largest circulation in Italy, said the FIFA penalty was too mild.

"His behavior had been reiterated more than once, so I think the penalty was a little light," a woman said. "I am sorry for Suarez, he was doing well, but rules must be respected. Bites are only given by children, and evidently he was not adult enough to play a football match," was the opinion of a young fan.

Many reactions also turned out to be ironical.

In a facetious survey carried out by Libero, a right-wing newspaper published in Milan, on "what would you do to punish Suarez for the biting," 60 percent of respondents said they would ban him from all stadiums in the world. More than 20 percent, however, asked to "apply a muzzle" and 10 percent to "shut him in a zoo," while 4 percent proposed to put Suarez into the hands of a "dog-sitter."

Some observers event tried to go into what they called the player's "psychological illness" attempting to analyze the profound reasons which lie in his "cannibalism", as Giuliano Ferrara, the director of Rome-based Il Foglio newspaper and frequent commentator, said.

Suarez's habit of biting people "evokes something surreal, a sort of crime to which we tend to," Ferrara pointed out also mentioning the "normality" and even "value" of similar episodes in the history of military virtues.

But all jokes and analysis aside, more than the impulsive though intolerable gesture of Suarez, what filled Italian commentators with utmost indignation was Uruguay's President Jose Mujica expressing his solidarity with the striker after he was punished by the FIFA Disciplinary Committee.

Mujica, who has been dubbed "the world's poorest president" as he lives on a ramshackle farm and gives 90 percent of his earnings to charity, "has recommended morality and temperance at every step," Massimo Gramellini, a renowned columnist of Turin-based La Stampa newspaper, noted.

But media reports have underlined Suarez "hero's welcome home" by Uruguay authorities and fans, and such an irresponsible "patriot reaction," which was careless of the necessary ethical values in the sports world, was the most disappointing bite for Italy, Gramellini stressed. Endi

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)