An Orthodontic Hat Trick

Tunku Varadarajan tackles yesterday’s big World Cup story:

During a goal-front tussle for the ball with [Italian defender] Giorgio Chiellini – a man as unappetizing as you could hope to find on a football field – [Uruguayan striker Luis] Suárez dipped his face onto his opponent’s shoulder and put his prodigious teeth to work. In scenes that were straight out of a comic opera, Chiellini, incensed, ran about wildly, his shirt pulled off his left shoulder, showing the world his bite-marks, the Suárez imprint on his body.

The ref somehow managed to miss the chomp, and Uruguay beat Italy 1 – 0. Varadarajan now expects “all hell to break loose”:

This is the third time the Uruguayan has bitten an opponent during a football match, and FIFA, the game’s governors, will have no choice but to ban him from the rest of this tournament. He cannot be allowed to play again in the Cup. Were it not for laws that immunize players from prosecution for their on-field actions, Suarez could well be facing charges for assault.

Mark Gilbert agrees:

Zinedine Zidane was banned for three games and fined about $6,000 after butting Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the chest in the 2006 World Cup final. Materazzi was also sanctioned after admitting he’d provoked the French captain. Suárez’s biting is much worse and he’s already a repeat offender. He clearly needs a time out, both from the current tournament and from football in general.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy half-seriously mulls over the “diplomatic implications” of the bite:

If FIFA, soccer’s organizing body, doesn’t suspend Suárez for the rest of the tournament and vacate the game, who knows what the Italian government might do: withdraw its Ambassador from Montevideo, say, or suspend its exports of pasta and olive oil. The U.N. might end up getting involved, and possibly even the Vatican. As a soccer fan who grew up in Buenos Aires and is now surrounded by Italians, Pope Francis has a vested interest in making sure that Suárez isn’t allowed to progress to the knockout stages, where Uruguay could well end up playing Argentina.

Adding a bit of context, Brian Merchant notes that “human-on-human biting isn’t actually all that uncommon”:

A 2007 National Institutes of Health study found that human bites were the third most-treated kind of mammal bites in the emergency room, behind dog and cat bites, accounting for anywhere between 5-20 percent of bite cases. That’s a not-insignificant number of human bites.

The study exclusively examined “occlusive bites” – the intentional teeth-on-skin aggression a la Suarez and Tyson – versus “fight bites,” which occur when a fist or arm gets punctured when it slams into someone else’s mouth. Men are 12 times as likely to sustain biting injuries, and in nearly 90 percent of the cases – surprise – alcohol was involved, the study found. You’re getting the picture. Men, drunk or jacked up on adrenaline, in a pub or an arena, are prone to turning into sweaty, tweaked-out vampires.