Mikey Stafford reports from Recife

THERE is a beautiful beach five blocks from my apartment but after almost a week here in the heat and humidity I have not been for a swim.

It’s the sharks, you see.

All along Boa Viagem there are signs warning you and rightly so.

Statistically you are more likely to be attacked by a shark along this 20-kilometre stretch of coast than anywhere else in the world.

Since 1992 Bull Sharks, whose spawning ground was disrupted by the construction of a new harbour, have made 53 attacks on humans — 20 of which were fatal.

A little paddle will suffice, thank you very much, and we will concentrate on the football. Tomorrow sees Arena Pernambuco host its fifth and final match of this World Cup when Costa Rica face Greece for a place in the quarter-finals.

It’s not the game the city was hoping for, you suspect, and it is certainly is not the game TheScore.ie was anticipating when it made its travel arrangements.

Italy, Uruguay, England, Ivory Coast, Japan or even Colombia — if things didn’t go according to plan for Jose Pekerman’s team. These were the teams we expected to see, but you roll the dice and take a chance.

Colombia won their group as expected and now play Uruguay — who no one expects to hang around much longer after the third recorded attack on a human by their goal-getter and heartbeat Luis Suarez.

The Liverpool striker is back home in Uruguay after FIFA banned him from all football-related activity for four months. Even if he wanted to engage in charity work he could not, although many now believe it is the 27 year old earning £200,000 per week who is the charity case.

He is not short of sympathisers. Some, such as his national coach, captain and Diego Maradona, are obvious. Others, such as the man he bit, Georgio Chiellini, less so.

Despite Oscar Tabarez’s ridiculous suggestion of a media conspiracy there is no defence for what Suarez did.

What he did was disgusting and hard to explain, particularly given his recidivism, but it is by no means the worst crime ever committed on a football field. Even as a repeat offender he does not deserve to play against Colombia today, but neither does he deserve to be exiled for one-third of a year from the only industry, outside of municipal sanitation, he has ever known.

Suarez needs someone to help him understand why the red mist descends and why he has thrice reacted by biting an opponent.

It is unsavoury but he is not a cannibal.

His workrate, guile and unerring accuracy is what makes him one of the most valuable goal-scorers in world football but all that shines through because of his guts.

Suarez’s passion and drive was used as a stick with which to beat the English team after he eliminated them from the World Cup with two goals in São Paulo, five days before he pushed Roy Hodgson’s men firmly off the front and back pages. Why could they not be more like the passionate, proud Uruguayan Suarez when they pulled on the white shirt?

Before Suarez bit Chiellini Wayne Rooney offered an apology to his countrymen in which he, without naming him directly, declared England must become more like the Uruguay striker. They need to show more guile and sneakiness — “Picardia” as the Uruguayans call it.

“You look at teams who have won the tournament over previous years and you can see that nastiness in them,” said Rooney. “I think we need to get that in us. Maybe we’re too honest, I feel, as a team. In terms of Uruguay the other night, they stopped the game, they committed I don’t know how many fouls … clever fouls, really, to slow the game down.”

In the Sopranos, Tony’s psychiatrist Dr Melfi describes his panic attacks as a “slight tick in his fight-flight response”. Suarez is no sociopathic mob boss with a propensity to faint under stress, nor is he a cannibal, but perhaps there’s a slight tick that causes him to bite opponents when things are not going his way on a football pitch.

It wasn’t pre-meditated, like Roy Keane’s over-the-ball challenge on Alfe Inge Haaland. It wasn’t life-threatening, like Harald Schumacher’s assault on Patrick Battiston. The worst thing you can say about Suarez’s crime is that it is gross and he has done it before.

Just because Suarez’s ascent from poverty to global fame is nothing unusual in football is no reason to discount it. He showed guts to make a success of his career and it is the same guts that mark him out on the field.

Biting people is nasty and Luis Suarez needs to stop doing that. There are lots of people who profit from his ability and it is in their interests to help him to stop biting people, without eradicating what it is that makes him worth the trouble.

Luis Suarez isn’t a shark, but I bet he would go for a swim in Recife.

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