Luis Suarez of Liverpool made the headlines again on Sun.
Jan 6th after his blatant handball goal against non-league side Mansfield
in their FA Cup tie, which turned out to be the winner in a 2-1 game. However,
he could have made more headlines around the world and gone down in history as
a sporting hero if he had simply owned up to the handball.
When watching the incident time and time again it appears
that Suarez purposely bats the ball downwards and into the net. And even if he
didn’t..even if the ball had actually bounced up and deflected in off of his
hand he could have owned up to it and let referee Andre Marriner still award
the goal if that’s the way the official saw it.
There’s no doubt that Suarez, who has 15 goals on the
season, is a great goal scorer and doesn’t need to cheat to get his name on the
score sheet, especially against a non-league team. That’s why we can even give
him the benefit of the doubt on this occasion. But he would have become an
instant role model and an example of a proper sportsman for telling the
officials the goal was scored with his hand.
I don’t blame him for scoring the goal in the manner he did, but blame him for not owning up to it when it was obvious that television cameras will show what really happened.
