Liverpool may be regretting their stance on the Luis Suárez racial abuse controversy after Friday's incident involving Oldham's Tom Adeyemi
The Luis Suárez T-shirts Liverpool wore at Wigan were always a bad idea, quite the worst attitude struck in a solidarity campaign that brought the club's decision-making into question if not disrepute, and the sight of supporters wearing them at the next home game at Anfield came with a queasy sense of foreboding. As several black sportsmen pointed out in the aftermath of the Wigan game, unqualified support for a player who had admitted bringing the colour of an opponent's skin into an argument on the pitch was at best a confused message and at worst a dangerous one.
It cannot be said with certainty that the fan responsible for the alleged racial abuse of Oldham's Tom Adeyemi on Friday night at Anfield was wearing one of the Suárez gesture garments, though police conducting an investigation have witness statements that raise the possibility. But it now seems clear that Liverpool's handling of the whole issue will come back to haunt them for the rest of the season. A backlash against Suárez is fully expected when the player returns from his eight-match ban, particularly if he plays against Manchester United, and Liverpool will have been bracing themselves for all manner of terrace taunts and insults in their away games in the meantime. What no one could have anticipated was the race issue erupting at Anfield so quickly after the events of the last month, almost literally blowing up in the club's face through the actions of Liverpool supporters.
This is hugely embarrassing for a club that quite rightly prides itself on zero tolerance of racism, and issues a booming reminder of that stance over the public address system before every Anfield kick-off. Most Premier League clubs do something similar in making supporters aware that racist behaviour is now an arrestable as well as an ejectionable offence, though you rarely hear the ground rules enunciated so loudly and so clearly as you do at Liverpool. This is not because the club have had problems with bigotry in the past, but because the club understood the anti-racism message from the word go and chose to stand squarely behind it.
That is why the defence of Suárez has proved so divisive. Liverpool never apologised, when a conciliatory statement on day one might have taken much of the heat out of the situation, and never appeared to consider the possibility that their player might have been even slightly at fault. Even now Kenny Dalglish's stance is that the club has been harshly treated for reasons that it is not possible to make public, while the player himself has offered a qualified apology that pointedly fails to include Patrice Evra and insists on his own innocence, despite an admission that he used the word "negro". There is no need here to reopen the debate about the nuances of what that might mean when uttered in Spanish, the FA have formed their conclusions and acted accordingly, and Liverpool have grudgingly accepted the outcome. Suárez is serving his suspension, yet possibly due to the ungracious way in which Liverpool have reacted to a sentence that most people beyond Merseyside feel is severe but justified, a lingering sense of resentment appears to have filled the void.
How else to explain why the Kop, with an enviable reputation for being both one-eyed yet fair-minded, should come to be sullied by apparently needless accusations of taunting a lower-league player because of the colour of his skin. The Kop is bigger than that, or should be. Liverpool are bigger than that, and used to be. It would be easy to blame Dalglish for all this, because his surly suspicion of outsiders and prickly reaction to any form of criticism has been on prominent display in the months following Evra's initial complaint in mid-October, though no one could possibly accuse the Liverpool manager of promoting racist behaviour or being anything but horrified at the damage a tiny minority of fans at the Oldham game have done to the image of his club.
All the same, actions have consequences, and though the T-shirts at Wigan were generously viewed in some quarters as Liverpool circling the wagons and going on the defensive, the dangers of going it alone and disagreeing so markedly with the rest of football opinion can now be seen a little more clearly. It has already been noted that Sir Alex Ferguson and Manchester United seemed to act with greater knowledge and professionalism. As soon as Evra made his manager aware of his grievance, Ferguson took him to the referees' room and made sure he obtained written statements. That done, Ferguson was content to let the FA deal with the case and abide by their instruction not to discuss the matter in public while deliberations were being made. Liverpool and Dalglish took a different course, and perhaps now wish they had not. If there is a lesson for football to learn from the past few weeks it is that the issue of race cannot be dismissed lightly. Any complaint should be taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and played by the book, not interpreted as an attack on the club or the integrity of its player.
That may seem obvious, but tribalism in football supporters is alarmingly easy to ignite. At Wigan a couple of weeks ago (why is it always Wigan?), a small minority of Chelsea supporters could be heard singing the Anton Ferdinand song ("You know what you are"). Ferdinand was nowhere in sight, of course, as Chelsea were not playing QPR; it was just the fans' way of expressing their support for John Terry. Warped logic, if you like, but once accusations start to fly and reputations are defended, these particular disputes take on a life of their own.
One hesitates even so to link the unpleasantness at Anfield directly to the Suárez case, to guess at the motivation of Adeyemi's alleged abuser(s) or to blame anyone within the club for the irresponsible actions of a spectator or two, though it seems fair to suggest that without the Suárez business it would probably never have happened. Maybe not all T-shirt wearers are really Liverpool supporters. Maybe the Kop was infiltrated by malign troublemakers from the other end of the East Lancs Road. But this time it simply cannot be Patrice Evra's fault.