LUIS SUAREZ HAS defended his history of biting players in matches by insisting it’s “relatively harmless”.
The forward received a four-month ban from competitive football for biting Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup and only made his debut for new club Barcelona, who paid Liverpool €86 million for his services, late last month.
The lengthy Fifa ban was because of his history of biting players, something very few other professional footballers have ever been caught doing — the incident with Chiellini was the third time in the past five years that the Uruguayan has been caught attacking an opposition player with his teeth.
Although Suarez admitted he could see why people are scared about being bitten, he compared his own moments of madness favourably to when boxer Mike Tyson infamously bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear.
“They treated me like a criminal,” he admitted in his autobiography, which Marca published part of on Wednesday. “[But] it was my fault.
“It was the third time something like that happened to me and I needed help, although I was an easy target.
“Biting scares a lot of people, but it’s relatively harmless, or at least it was in the incidents I was involved in.
“None of my bites were like Mike Tyson’s on Evander Holyfield, but nobody cares about that.”
Suarez made his unofficial debut for Barca in the Gamper Trophy back in the summer and he has revealed his head coach compared the striker’s sentence to that of a high-security terrorism prisoner in Cuba.
“‘They’ve finally released him from Guantanamo Bay to be with us,’” the 27-year-old claimed Luis Enrique said after the match. “Everyone applauded the newly-released prisoner and I tried not to blush.”
Suarez was linked heavily with Arsenal last year but, ultimately, Liverpool clung on to the former Ajax forward for one final season. He conceded that the decision was made in part because Steven Gerrard convinced him that a bigger club from abroad would want him sooner or later.
“He was spot on,” the striker said of the Anfield skipper. “He said: ‘Stay, play well for Liverpool, and Bayern, Real Madrid or Barca will soon come calling, because you’re good enough to play anywhere.’”
