First

It's an unusual feeling for me. As I was editing last night's post about Ian Wright, Suarez bit Chiellini, and I used the incident for an ending. It occurred to me afterwards that most of you will have been watching the England game if you were watching at all, so I checked my visit stats, and for the first time in my life, a potential 71 of you HEARD IT HERE FIRST. I felt like Jon Simpson riding a tank into Baghdad. Or whatever it was he did. Frankly if they're going to fight wars during the last six weeks of the season they've no business being disappointed if our attention wanders a little. 2003 was an odd numbered year, for Christ's sake, they only had to wait a few weeks and we'd have followed the whole thing quite diligently.

The Suarez incident itself raises many questions, not the least of which relates to probability theory. For instance: if you're a professional footballer, are you more likely to be bitten by Luis Suarez or by a shark?


Well, according to Ian Steadman in the New Statesman (thanks to @TheMichaelMoran for the link), you're far more likely to be bitten by Suarez. His calculations are as follows.

Luis Suarez has played 441 games, during which he's bitten 3 players. He estimates 14 players to a game, allowing for three substitutes, giving odds of 1 in 2,058. Shockingly, the New Statesman settle for 1 in 2,000. I have to say I thought they had higher standards than that. If reputable journalists can't disguise an absurdly low sample size with an unrealistically precise figure in this day and age, I've no idea how they expect to survive in the media.

And their numbers aren't quite right anyway, or rather they aren't quite measuring the right thing. There may be 14 players in total, but there are only 11 at any given time. The risk to any player who plays 90 minutes against him is the same as the combined risk of a substitute and the player he's substituted for. This is 1 in 1617. Or 1 in 1600, as the New Statesman might have it.

Even this carries its own caveats. For instance, it assumes that when a player is substituted the delusional sense of injustice Suarez has accumulated against him is transferred to the player that comes on. It might easily be that he actually concedes the new player a mental blank sheet, in which case you could actually stop him biting players altogether simply by allowing 30 substitutes a game. At some point you have to call a halt to realism and just say this is assumed, though. And I speak as someone who knows a bit about assuming things.

So we'll take those to be the odds for a game, but what if you play him regularly? Let's say he averages 4 years at any given club (he was 4 years at Ajax, and judging by the noises currently coming out of Liverpool he might not manage much more than 4 in England). Setting aside injuries and suspensions, mainly suspensions, and bearing in mind the potential for cup games, pre-season unfriendlies and so on, you might perhaps expect to play him 6 times in that period. On that basis, your chances of being bitten by him at some point are about 1 in 270 (actually my spreadsheet says 1 in 269.917, but unfortunately I've already used the word might, so couldn't really get away with a decimal point).

This is a significant risk. If you're a regular Premiership first team player, it's definitely worth getting your shots. We can't rule out the possibility that Suarez's urge to bite is biological, and if it's biological it might be contagious. Chiellini plays for Juventus, so if there's a zombie outbreak in Serie A we'll know why.

Going back to the original question, whichever figure you go with, it's still much more likely than being bitten by a shark. The odds on being bitten by a shark while swimming in the ocean are about 1 in 3.7 million.  By those odds, I bet that even while swimming in the ocean you're still more likely to be bitten by Luis Suarez. Now there's an idea if Spielberg's looking for a new project.

Incidentally, did you notice how I put the jump break after the question, but before the answer? I think I may be getting better at this.

And while I'm doing the incidentallies, this season's Mourinho Medal for sheer fucking nerve goes to newspaper El Observador of Uruguay, who according to the BBC World Cup gossip column said the English media have begun a campaign against Suarez, as if mentioning the subject is somehow impolite. This may be the first time in my life I've felt like defending the English media.

Although on checking I discover that the relevant sentence in Spanish is Los medios, sobre todo, ingleses -incluso más que los italianos- ya comenzaron la campaña en contra del uruguayo, which according to my dog Latin actually means the English in the middle have locked up their mothers with the Italians and moved to the countryside to do some sobering up with the Uruguayan Contras. This is quite a different matter. I actually think I may be the only honest commentator out there, and I'm only doing it to kill time before kickoff. Fortunately it's now five o'clock, so perhaps Lionel Messi can raise the tone.