Evra accuses Suarez of racism

[Exiled_red]

Its in the report.Dowd jotted down in general terms what each witness said that day,Marriner then used those notes to help in writing his report.When he was finished writing his report he destroyed Dowds notes.

Amongst the many unbelievable things I've read in it I especially like the part where they go on about Suarez accepting in full the statements of the united players and manager and because he did that,then that corroborates Evra's version of events.Quite brilliantly the completely ignore the fact that those statements are simply other players reporting to the FA what Evra told them had happened,in other words Evra corroborates his own story by telling it to other people and having them back him up.

I mentioned this before, it's crazy

[KingKenny77]

Tbh I think this is exactly the kind of argument that is frustratingly making us Liverpool fans come across to some as desperate apologists. The fact Evra is black does not make it ok to refer to it in any context - 'black cunt' for instance would be completely unacceptable. There are plenty of good arguments about why Suarez might be getting a very raw deal here but 'well, Evra IS black' really is not one of them.

Well when referring to his racial make up, what should we refer him as? Is he a blackman or isn't he a blackman? What is he if he isn't black? Maybe he is Maroon? Maybe he is Orange? Maybe he is Yellow (oh sorry, that's a racist term as well isn't it?). Do you not see how ridiculous this entire fiasco is? It's as stupid as changing "Baa, Baa Black sheep in Baa Baa Rainbow sheep". Suarez has not said anything racist and has not been racist. This is the Football Association reacting to Sepp Blatter's idiocy a month or so ago. This is the Football Association trying to put themselves on a moral highground. They are using Suarez as an example because he is an easy target.

I'm all for ridding racism and any form of discrimination from society, but when incidents like this happen where one man's name is dragged through fifteen miles of excrement because one man's word is taken over another, then I will speak out against what I feel is a grave miscarriage of justice.

If Suarez was a racist then ban him and sell him from our club, but I don't for one second believe that Suarez was racist to Evra - players like Evra who throw wild accusations about are racists themselves in my book.

[The Birdman]

We're being advised to accept it apologise and move on because it's the english way.
Do as your told, dont question anything and suck it up.

Well **** that, if we still believe Suarez has been hard done by then we should keep going, lose the appeal to the FA (which is what will happen) then go higher again, we must have some recourse of justice at a higher level, legally challenge the FA findings.

Yes we should also come out and say Suarez made a mistake, he admitted it in the hearing so we're not hiding it but argue to get the ban reduced which is a fair punishment.

Oh and Chris Bascombe is an agenda driven cunt who knows nothing

[Exiled_red]

seems to me then they've set a precedent there they've not followed without reasonable cause.

This needs to be taken above the FA, a half competent lawyer would tear a new arsehole out of their decision

I don't think we've got any chance of success within the FA's framework. We should be exploring every opportunity to take this to a different forum, preferably outside the country.

If we are in a situation whereby the commission can arrive at any decision it likes so long as the procedures are followed then we are snookered, as they can interpret events any way they choose and spin a narrative to support that with impunity.

It's a very harsh decision to give such a ban based on so little real evidence, the more I read the report the more I am certain they were out to get Suarez from the start.

[KingKenny77]

The problem is that if we appeal Suarez could be suspended for more matches.

[Exiled_red]

Yes I found that utterly bizarre about Suarez 'accepting' things by not refuting them when he would never have been in any position to confirm or deny them, and also about Evra corroborating his own story merely by repeating it to people.

Dowd's notes being binned I get tbh. The ref probably wouldn't have realised their importance at the time and would have figured he'd recorded all the info in his report so it wouldn't matter.

The notes being thrown away is very strange, it could be an innocent mistake, but it looks dodgy.

[Exiled_red]

they've actually also damaged the reputation of the English game they're just too self righteous to see it.

You also have to wonder why most other countries FA have little to no time for the English FA! It couldn't be down to their arrogant self important outlook on things could it?

[Exiled_red]

The worst thing I've seen is someone branding us a Racist football club because Johnson is our only black player.

It's gone beyond a joke its turning into madness.

I think what fans of other clubs, the Mancs and possibly even some Liverpool fans are failing to see is that this has gone beyond football now, people need to get past their opinion of a football club and make judgement on the person that is being slowly pushed out of English football by a clueless governing body.

At the end of the day, sooner or later if the FA are allowed to carry on acting this way it will eventually come back to haunt everyone. It will get to the point where every time a derogatory comment is made about someone there will be complaints/appeals/bans. And now the FA have set the bar with 8 games. Its their duty to be consistent.

[The Birdman]

As a black mate of mine said -
If Suarez is a racist for what he said then we need to start locking up all the black's who greet their black friends with a greeting containing 'my nig*a'

As he said, if i as a white guy called a random black lad by the n word i would deserve to get a kicking but within their group of friends it is their greeting to each other, all the rapper use it in their songs.

What Suarez did was wrong but only because he is playing in England and we are a jumped up self important country too preoccupied by back handers and point scoring to understand that there is a bigger world out there.
Suarez should get a ban for admitting he used the word in error, 8 games on the word of a proven liar is pathetically predictable.

4 game ban with a further 4 suspended with an acknowledgement from the FA that it is mainly a misunderstanding on both sides, Suarez was not intending to make a racist comment and i think we would have accepted it

[badpiggy]

I don't share the certainty that others on here have about Suarez' innocence. Equally I think the FA are a bunch of puffed-up point-scoring gutless idiots. However, what I have thought the whole way through is that LFC have handled this really badly. The Suarez t-shirts were a particularly bad idea. If this happened locally in a small town, the t-shirt idea would be dismissed as being a crass and inappropriate gesture. When the eyes of the world are on a massive club and institution like LFC it beggars belief that this idea got any further than the team bus. We've handled an incredibly sensitive issue with a level of emotive paranoia that has come back to bite us. Sure, the world should be a different way and the FA should have handled it differently but the world isn't another way and anyone could see that the FA would either rightly or wrongly err on the side of being seen to be tough on racism. We should have been seen to be the same.

This article from the Irish Independent is interesting:

It is a tale of two testimonies -- one of them almost entirely consistent, one of them utterly chaotic. But the account of why Luis Suarez has been convicted of abusing Patrice Evra -- laid out in such unsparing detail by an independent commission that we even know that a blue-and-yellow coin was spun for kick-off on the fateful afternoon Liverpool met Manchester United at Anfield -- is also one of two managers.

Alex Ferguson, whose player came to him in the dressing-room with an allegation of racial abuse, was the manager who calmly placed the course of the future in that individual's hands -- "What do you want to do about it?" he asked Evra -- and who then took control of the situation.

Ferguson's instruction that referee Andre Marriner ought to take a verbatim note when he and Evra arrived in the officials' room was illustrative of an individual who knew just how significant this allegation was.

Kenny Dalglish, the manager who had everything to lose from a flabby defence of Suarez, was far less in touch, although he certainly knew what was heading his way before Marriner's fourth official, Phil Dowd, knocked on the Liverpool dressing-room door at around 2.45pm on October 15 and asked him to head for the officials' room.

Walls have ears in the tight back corridors of Anfield and Liverpool's match-day administration manager, Ray Haughan, had overheard Marriner's conversation with Ferguson and Evra.

Yet Dalglish responded to Dowd with a joke about the rule preventing managers not approaching officials within 30 minutes of the final whistle and when Marriner later explained Evra's accusation, the manager's response was: "Hasn't he done this before?"

The implication that Evra is an unreliable witness has been rehearsed over and over by Liverpool in the past two months, but the commission's 115-page reasoning for Suarez's conviction reveals it was entirely absent from the Uruguayan's case, put by Peter McCormick QC.

The written note Ferguson suggested Marriner take in that chaotic first hour at Anfield proved deeply significant in the commission's damning conclusion. It described as "implausible" and "simply incredible" Suarez's defence: that his use of the words "por que, negro?" in an exchange with Evra was entirely harmless.

If there was one lesson Liverpool might have taken from United on matters like this, it is the importance of intelligent, consistent evidence.

When United claimed racial abuse against Chelsea after the so-called 'Battle of Stamford Bridge' in 2008, a commission damned the club for the "inconsistent" and "exaggerated" evidence of coaches Mike Phelan and Tony Strudwick.

evidence

Liverpool's evidence was worse -- incomparably worse -- and the club appear to have been blinded by pure contempt that a United player should lay this claim at their door.

Liverpool threatened to pursue a defamation claim against Evra within 24 hours of his allegation and when Gordon Taylor, the Professional Footballers' Association chief executive, appealed for dialogue and an apology for any offence caused, Liverpool would have none of it.

It is important to note the allegations first made against Suarez have not been proven in their full, initial enormity and the commission has not found the striker guilty of any form of racism. Evra initially alleged an n-word far more vile than 'negro' but now accepts he did not hear '******.'

In interview, the defender translated negro as the French negre, which translates as both 'negro' and '******'. But the insulting and abusive reference to the colour of a player's skin is still outlawed under the FA's Rule E3(1) for good reason and it has been in their hapless effort to get their story straight on this issue that Liverpool have embarrassed themselves.

There was an attempt to get some facts out that afternoon at Anfield, although it proved to be a fateful enterprise. The commission report lays out that Liverpool's director of football Damien Comolli, an accomplished linguist, realised the gravity of the accusation against Suarez, questioned him in Spanish and then related to Marriner the Uruguayan's story of how, after Evra had said, "Don't touch me, South American", Suarez had replied, "Por que, tu eres negro?" (Why, because you are black?) -- words corroborated by Dalglish and Dirk Kuyt.

Comolli actually spelt out the Spanish to Dowd, Marriner's designated note-taker, though he did not appear to realise that this aggressive allusion to a player's skin colour might be a breach of Rule E3(1). Perhaps Suarez did, because he subsequently claimed his response to Evra had merely been "por que negro?" (why, black?) positing 'negro' as a colloquial Uruguayan Spanish term of affection.

When the discrepancies between Suarez and his colleagues' witness statements became apparent, Liverpool clearly realised they had a problem and stories started changing.

Suarez claimed a "misunderstanding" on the parts of both Comolli and Kuyt, who agreed that yes, of course, there must have been one. But the commission saw through that and deemed Suarez's claims that negro was a term of such affection that he used it on team-mate Glen Johnson equally hollow.

The commission's commendably exhaustive work included the use of Manchester University linguistics experts to show that colloquial 'negro' is equally likely to be a malign term. In the absence of video to lip-read from, it also analysed the players' body language at moments crucial to the case. There was no endearment about the way Suarez used negro, and no evidence that Evra had said "South American" in the first place.

The Uruguayan's reliability as a witness collapsed and, in a case which pitted Evra's word against his, the remainder of the Frenchman's accusations were found to be valid.

Evra's reputation was actually enhanced. He admitted he initiated the verbal sparring with Suarez with the phrase "concha de tu hermana", which translates literally as an unprintable slight on an individual's sister, though colloquially as 'you son of a b**ch'.

But obscenity is not the same as dishonesty and the United player's preparedness to admit he had started things -- "even though it reflected badly on him" as the commission noted -- counted in his favour as an "impressive witness who gave evidence in a calm, composed and clear manner".

The commission tried six times to pin Suarez down on another piece of his evidence, relating to why he touched Evra's head, before he was forced to admit that an initial statement suggesting this had been a conciliatory gesture had been false.

Liverpool's legal team went to remarkable attempts in its attempt to explain why Evra would fabricate allegations against Suarez, including the motive of "vengeance" for a sequence of events going wrong at Anfield, including Evra disputing the coin-toss.

The commission was told that Evra, who always calls yellow and never blue -- a Manchester City colour -- on the Fifa coin was adamant that yellow-side up gave him the right to choose ends, which he badly wanted. "We consider this submission to be unrealistic," the commission concluded. The driver of Liverpool's blind faith in Suarez has been Dalglish, whose utter certainty before Christmas that Suarez would be acquitted and free to play throughout suggests he misread the events of the three-day hearing as completely as the first exchanges that afternoon in the rooms of Anfield.

Ferguson's only words on the subject, delivered on December 23, suggest he foresaw the outcome: "Our support of Patrice was obvious right from the word go and that's still the same. The matter is over." (© Independent News Service)

[kop-al-74]

As a black mate of mine said -
If Suarez is a racist for what he said then we need to start locking up all the black's who greet their black friends with a greeting containing 'my nig*a'

As he said, if i as a white guy called a random black lad by the n word i would deserve to get a kicking but within their group of friends it is their greeting to each other, all the rapper use it in their songs.

What Suarez did was wrong but only because he is playing in England and we are a jumped up self important country too preoccupied by back handers and point scoring to understand that there is a bigger world out there.
Suarez should get a ban for admitting he used the word in error, 8 games on the word of a proven liar is pathetically predictable.

4 game ban with a further 4 suspended with an acknowledgement from the FA that it is mainly a misunderstanding on both sides, Suarez was not intending to make a racist comment and i think we would have accepted it

That seems like the best outcome of this situation I have read yet.

[Exiled_red]

It is looking like the club handled this very badly in terms of the collection of evidence and the way things were handled, I find it very odd that we should have refused to allow this to have been settled by discussions between the two players.

But I also find it very odd that after Ferguson insisted that Dowd take notes of what was said, these notes were later destroyed. To me that is very suspicious.

Suarez was always going to get some kind of ban for refering to skin colour, and while I can see that our approach in this matter hasn't helped things and the ban taken on one mans word is very harsh. I still can't believe that no-one else heard what was said, the inconsistencies in Suarez' statement don't make him look good, but there also seem to be inconsitencies in Evra's version, but these seem to be accepted and ignored. In light of this I don't see how the panel could have come down so strongly on one side or the other. If Evra's version of events is true and Suarez racially abused him 7 times, Suarez was really lucky that every time there was someone or something obscuring all the cameras, if we're talking about a balance of probabilities it seems fairly improbable to me that on each of the 7 occasions no camera could pick it up.

[Kenneth]

We haven't seen the video evidence of the pinch, but does anyone really believe that Suarez was being friendly and conciliatory in the circumstances? Is that really a convincing scenario? If not, then he's probably guilty in that instance. I don't think we've got a leg to stand on if the video is as suggested. My only fear is that the club has taken this so far and raised the stakes so high that we feel we have to appeal even if we have little grounds to and make things worse.

[Vermilion]

We haven't seen the video evidence of the pinch, but does anyone really believe that Suarez was being friendly and conciliatory in the circumstances? Is that really a convincing scenario? If not, then he's probably guilty in that instance. I don't think we've got a leg to stand on if the video is as suggested. My only fear is that the club has taken this so far and raised the stakes so high that we feel we have to appeal even if we have little grounds to and make things worse.

Funny how people think differently, but so far, i've seen nor heard nothing that 'convinces' me of Suarez's guilt.

For Suarez to be tagged a Racist for the rest of his life i believe it should have been proved beyond all doubt, and not on the basis of probabilty based on what Evra said being the exact truth, someone they know to have embellished evidence before too.

[Exiled_red]

We haven't seen the video evidence of the pinch, but does anyone really believe that Suarez was being friendly and conciliatory in the circumstances? Is that really a convincing scenario? If not, then he's probably guilty in that instance. I don't think we've got a leg to stand on if the video is as suggested. My only fear is that the club has taken this so far and raised the stakes so high that we feel we have to appeal even if we have little grounds to and make things worse.

I haven't seen the video I think there were suggestions that this wasn't video footage that was available to TV cameras. For me it depends what their definition of 'pinch' is, to me it suggests a nip or something similar which I can't see being a friendly gesture, however given the way things seem to have been defined in this report it could have been a grab and squeeze of the arm which may be a friendly or aggressive gesture.

I think that the club have handled this situation quite badly in some regards.