Liverpool’s cheating Luis Suarez inspired by Team GB’s win-at-all-costs dive

THE papers are pretty unanimous: Luis Suarez is a cheat. The Liverpool striker is cheat who robbed “plucky” Mansfield Town of FA Cup glory in the third round, ripping the romance of the FA Cup to smithereens. “Caught red-handed,” said the Times. “You cheat!” thundered the Sun. “Suarez handball KO’s Brave Stags.” But it’s not only foreign Suarez the papers hate. It’s football.

Not so long ago, Team GB were scooping Olympic medals in the Velodrome. In one race, the lads took men’s team sprint at London 2012. The Telegraph cheered:

Sir Chris Hoy and Great Britain’s team sprint squad claimed a glorious gold medal record in the men’s final tonight, breaking the world record in both the semi-final and then again in the final when they defeated France, posting an almost unbelievable time of 42.600sec.

The glory might have been tainted had anyone bothered to care.

Philip Hindes was in the winning trio. In the contest’s opening round (the equivalent of the FA Cup third found) Hindes crashed. The race was restarted. Team GB won. Said Hindes:

“I just did it, just to get the restart because my first start wasn’t the greatest. I thought ‘get a restart to play the safe card’.”

Later, this apparent admittance to having taken a dive was passed off by his management as a misquote. He said it. He just never meant it.

So, how did the Sun and all other paper’s greet the team’s win? They cheered wildly. The fans didn’t care for allegations of cheating in early rounds. Winning was everything.

The Independent thundered:

Just seconds after Sir Chris Hoy had sped home towards Britain’s first gold of the track Olympics last night, for once the DJ got it right and the strains “The Boys Are Back In Town” blasted out across, in what can only have been an unconscious nod to the fact that here in Stratford, four years after Beijing, history was repeating itself in the most wonderful of ways.

So. What does the Independent’s James Lawton says of Uruguay-born Suarez:

The imperative to win, in any way possible, to dive for advantage, to have an opponent sent off by any contrivance, has become so all-consuming that the gesture of Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler in protesting a penalty awarded against his opponent David Seaman 16 years ago has become so quaint, so remote, it might have been dreamed up at King Arthur’s Round Table.

Will Liverpool fans care about Suarez’s indiscretion should their team win the FA Cup? Why should they when the newspapers rejoiced when their team won the Olympics after a dubious not-all-that-Corinthian start: