Uruguay and Liverpool striker Luis Suarez has just been banned from all football for four months after FIFA found him guilty of biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini in their game on Tuesday night.

Suarez, who has bitten players on the pitch twice before, has also been banned from Uruguay’s next 9 matches - which means he won’t play again in this World Cup – and fined 100,000 Swiss francs.

But Liz Nice argues a ban is wrong....When I was a kid, I loved tennis. Wimbledon was the most exciting time of the year. Who would McEnroe yell at this time? He acted like a child: full of rage and indignation, primed to fly off the handle at any moment.

Jimmy Connors was nearly as bad. And then there was Ilie Nastase, who my Mum had quite a thing for.

They had style and passion. They brought tennis alive.

Now, as I sit at my desk, I can see Wimbledon going on in the corner of the office and I honestly couldn’t care less. Yes, it was nice to see Andy Murray win last year – I even took a picture of him on the telly on my phone – but I failed to get my own sons to have even the slightest interest in the historic moment, even though they are the same age I was when I first fell in love with the game.

Why? Because, as Andy Murray himself said, he has a ‘boring voice’. And tennis is boring. Because no one is ever naughty any more.

We fall in love with sport as children and it is our child-like selves that continue to love sport throughout our lives.

Nowhere but at football do I ever behave so childishly, singing stupid songs such as ‘She fell over ‘ and ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’ with relish because it’s the only time in our dull, pedestrian adult lives when we still get to mess around.

I was thinking about this as I watched the predictable outrage over Luis Suarez this week. Endless dull and boring journalists are ranting about how he should be hounded out of our game because, well, they are boring!

I am boring.

But Luis Suarez, God love him (because someone’s got to), is many things but he is certainly never dull.

He has behaved as a child behaves. And a naughty child must be put on the naughty step, (as he has been today) but should he really have had his toys taken away forever as many are still suggesting? Surely that would have been a huge step too far?

You know what, dull, boring journalists, let’s send Suarez away! Let’s fill our game with Gareth Barrys and Michael Carricks and Paul Scholes’s, although in the case of the latter, it’s beginning to look, following his recent media pronouncements, that there was quite a bit of buried rage in there too.

But if we do eventually evict this brilliant, troubled man from our game, as I feel sure we will, although it is the one thing that he was truly born to do, then be aware of what it is we are really doing.

We are making football infinitely more boring.

And we are killing the child within us all.

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