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• United coach indicates Liverpool should accept ban
• Kenny Dalglish concerned about crowd reaction to Suárez

Sir Alex Ferguson has broken his silence on the Luis Suárez affair, describing the Liverpool striker’s eight-match ban for racially abusing Patrice Evra as “the right decision” and indicating that the Anfield club should accept the guilty verdict.

Liverpool’s vigorous defence of the Uruguayan, including the controversial decision to warm up for their game at Wigan in Suárez T-shirts, has led to widespread criticism throughout the game. Ferguson was not willing to talk about Liverpool’s protest statement, in which they described Evra as “not reliable” and called on the Football Association to issue a separate charge against the Manchester United defender, but he made clear that the Premier League champions felt vindicated.

“Our support of Patrice was obvious right from the word go and that’s still the same. The matter is over and I think we’re satisfied that they [the FA's independent commission] found the right decision. This wasn’t about Manchester United and Liverpool at all. It was nothing to do with that. This was an individual situation where one person was racially abused.”

Liverpool maintain that was not the case, despite Suárez reportedly admitting using the word “negro”, and are now waiting for the commission chairman, Paul Goulding QC, to deliver his full written findings before deciding whether to lodge an appeal.

That risks an even longer ban and Ferguson drew a parallel with the way United reacted when Evra was banned for four matches in 2008 for becoming embroiled in a post-match fight with Sam Bethell, a Chelsea groundsman. The club, he pointed out, had accepted the verdict.

“Patrice got that suspension for the incident down at Chelsea when no one was there, just a groundsman and our fitness coach. He got a four-match ban and we had to wait two weeks for the evidence to come through. We were quite astounded at that. A four-match ban? We thought it was well over the top for a trivial incident. But it happened and there’s nothing you can do about it, you know.”

The insinuation was that Liverpool should accept Suárez’s guilt but there is no sign of that from Anfield, with Kenny Dalglish maintaining he had no regrets over the T-shirt protest and aggressive wording of their statement.

“The club have issued a statement and the players have made their statement both visually and verbally,” said Dalglish. “The statement couldn’t have caused anybody any trouble. I don’t think the players have caused any trouble with the FA either with their statement or by their support with the T-shirts. If we are not in any trouble, we will just leave it at that before we do get into any trouble.”

Dalglish said “it might be weeks” before the commission’s findings are made public and believes the verdict and the reasons for it should have been released simultaneously. In the vacuum, the Liverpool manager fears opposition crowds will declare open season on Suárez, as was the case at the DW Stadium on Wednesday.

He said: “I wouldn’t think it is helpful to anybody that it [the verdict] is done before we have seen the written documents. If that’s the way they have always done it then we cannot complain. I wouldn’t know because I have never been involved in anything like this before.

“They [the Football Association] run the game; we don’t, do we? Whether you agree with it is another matter. In another walk of life, they would have walked away and waited until they had it ready. But this is what happened. I think where they have to be more supportive is the reaction from people – and the antagonism of the crowds – towards Luis. That is the great problem.”

The Liverpool manager believes the fallout from the complex case will be far-reaching for the FA. “It would be helpful to everyone if someone gave us some guidelines about what you can and cannot say,” he argued. Yet despite his concerns over the hostility towards Suárez, who is also facing an improper conduct charge for allegedly making an offensive gesture towards Fulham supporters at Craven Cottage on 5 December, Dalglish is adamant the 24-year-old can handle the scrutiny.

“Obviously he would be better off without it, but he is a strong enough character and he has handled it very well up to now so I wouldn’t expect him to show anything other than total strength. If Luis is fit and well, he will be considered for the matches until such time that he is under sanction.”

Ferguson is clearly unimpressed with the lengths to which Liverpool have gone, including Dalglish’s decision to wear a Suaárez T-shirt during a television interview on Wednesday. “I don’t need to talk about it,” he said, before adding pointedly: “I’m happy with how I run my club.”

The United manager was asked whether he fears it will worsen the rivalry between the two clubs. “This is the biggest derby game in the country,” he replied. “It’s never needed anything to light the powder keg; it’s always there.”

Sir Alex FergusonLuis SuárezManchester UnitedLiverpoolAndy HunterDaniel Taylorguardian.co.uk

Football has fought a long campaign to fight prejudice in the game, but the reaction of two clubs to recent allegations has been shortsighted and damaging

The pictures above were taken less than five months apart. The first shows Liverpool lining up before their pre-season friendly against Valerenga on 1 August, the players holding aloft signs reading “Show Racism the Red Card”, a response to the shooting and bombing attack by the far-right gunman Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers, last July.

The second is part of the club’s officially sanctioned public response to the decision by the FA’s independent tribunal to ban Luis Suárez for eight games after finding him guilty of racially abusing Manchester’s United’s Patrice Evra. The contrast is extreme, the contexts, admittedly, make for a risible comparison. But somewhere between these images is a fault line down which the disconnect between football’s flagship position as a beacon against racism in British society, and what actually happens when a major institution is confronted with evidence of such behaviour in its own ranks, has tumbled this week.

It is probably no more than the coincidence of random events that sees two high-profile cases of alleged racial abuse played out alongside each other. Suárez and the accusations against Chelsea’s John Terry are separate if similar incidents and using one to predict the outcome of the other is a speculative dead end. What does and should bear comparison, however, is how both have been handled by the clubs involved from the moment the accusations became public, and how this squares with what has been a consistent and laudable campaign by virtually the entire body politic of British football to eradicate racism, sectarianism and, latterly, Islamophobia from its ranks over the last 20 years.

As its players became rich beyond imagination, as its core fanbase found itself priced out of gleaming stadiums, as the oligarchs snaffled up clubs for fun, as the ability to watch games on television was closed to those unwilling to pay through the nose, football’s publicity machine has required a narrative to shield it from well-founded charges that the game’s values have descended to little more than a brazen assault on the pockets of a captive fanbase.

Most big clubs run well-established charitable programmes and star players, largely enthusiastically, make themselves available for various hospital visits or publicity events for community projects. But against charges of increased alienation from normal society, football has had need of a well-structured counter-narrative. It is little exaggeration to say that in the past decade, anti-racism campaigns have formed the principal plank of the game’s efforts to present itself as a force for cohesion and solidarity in the often uneasy melting pot of British life.

This is not to deride those efforts as a cynical exercise. The atmosphere inside grounds is unrecognisable from the 1980s, where the sense of incipient violence and exclusionary hostility made attending a football match a dangerous proposition for most people of colour, and black players found abuse from the terraces and the thinly veiled prejudice of coaches a constant adversary. Campaigns such as Kick it Out and Show Racism the Red Card would be justifiably enraged at the notion that they are merely part of a fig-leaf to mollify the perception of football’s deeper

The Luis Suárez-Patrice Evra case was not a simple one but the FA made a bold statement by banning him for eight games

Rightly or wrongly, there was a feeling before the verdict was announced, that if Luis Suárez was found guilty, it was an opportunity for the Football Association to send out a powerful message. This was the governing body’s chance to impose the sort of ban and fine that would make players up and down the country, as well as the game’s key decision-makers, realise how seriously the FA views racism. Now the Uruguayan has been banned for eight matches and fined £40,000, the FA has done just that.

The FA’s strong stance was welcomed by Kick It Out, its chair Lord Herman Ouseleysaying: “The FA has shown leadership and intent through what has clearly been a difficult and complex complaint to deal with, and invested time and expertise to ensure this outcome. It has demonstrated that it will not stand for discrimination, something organisations such as Fifa and Uefa should take heed of. Kick It Out will continue to work with clubs and players, at professional and grass roots level, offering education on what is deemed offensive and unacceptable behaviour.”

English football has worked hard to eradicate racism and great strides have been made since the bleak days of the 1980s, when the former Liverpool winger John Barnes recalls “there wasn’t a game when you didn’t get racial abuse as a black player”. Yet the two controversial cases that arose within eight days of each other in October, involving Patrice Evra and Suárez and Anton Ferdinand and John Terry, left the FA with two high-profile investigations on its hands and prompted wider discussions about the prevalence of racism in the domestic game.

Not everyone came out of the debate that followed with their reputation enhanced. Sepp Blatter dug himself into a hole that ought to have cost him his job as Fifa president, while Gus Poyet did himself no favours when he suggested players should turn a deaf ear to whatever is said to them on the pitch. “I played football for seven years in Spain and was called everything because I was from South America, and I never went out crying like a baby, like Patrice Evra, saying that someone had something to me,” the Brighton & Hove Albion manager said.

Those complaining at the length of time the investigations have dragged on were ignoring the complexities of cases that were never going to be resolved in a matter of days or, as Blatter would like, with a handshake at the final whistle. Only this week the Crown Prosecution Service revealed that further evidence had been received in relation to the allegation that Terry racially abused Ferdinand during Chelsea’s 1-0 defeat against Queens Park Rangers in October.

Evra-Suárez has been anything but straightforward, in part because of the fact that it has been one man’s word against another but also due to the cultural differences and linguistic nuances that have muddied the waters when it comes to deciding whether the word “negro”, which is regarded as extremely offensive in England, has the same meaning in South America. Suárez’s defence was understood to have pointed to the nuances of the Spanish language, as well as cultural differences.

More significant was whether Suárez, after four years living in northern Europe, should have an understanding of what is and is not acceptable. What is clear is that the controversial incidents that surfaced in October, at Anfield and Loftus Road, presented the FA with a headache that it could have done without. Racism allegations are always going to be a sensitive issue but the involvement of two of the most powerful clubs in the country, Liverpool and Manchester United, and the England captain, Terry, has placed the governing body under the microscope.

“Hopefully an 8 game ban & £40k fine will deter players from racially abusing an opponent from now on!” tweeted the former Crystal Palace striker Mark Bright. “About time strong action was taken!”

The FA has had racism allegations to deal with in the past but the protagonists have been nothing like as high profile. There was certainly nothing like the same level of media scrutiny when,