What Suárez did was callous, premeditated and dimwitted to the point that, if Liverpool had any sense, they would have condemned it on the spot and at least salvaged a semblance of dignity. Instead, they reverted to their default setting whenever Suárez comes under scrutiny: this half-baked conspiracy that everyone is against them and that the only way to combat this is to go on the attack themselves. Outraged by everything, ashamed of nothing.
Perhaps we should be used to it by now but it was still shocking to see Dalglish, one of the giants of our game, eyeballing his interviewer and tell him that it was “bang out of order” to suggest that Suárez had done anything even remotely wrong.
At least Sir Alex Ferguson, so aggrieved he said Suárez should never be allowed to wear Liverpool’s colours again, could step out of his own anger to acknowledge that Patrice Evra should have resisted his post-match victory dance.
This was the moment when Dalglish should have taken a deep breath and admitted that, yes, it was wrong of Suárez, unhelpful and immature, and he would be pointing this out to his player. Instead, he played dumb. He had no idea what had happened in the fair-play handshake and, in the absence of a polygraph, Robert De Niro would have been proud of his dramatic pose.
Then he realised the questions were not going to end there and it was here the paranoia, the blind bias and pigheaded denials all merged into one.
At one point he switched the subject to blame Sky. “When we had the FA Cup tie, because there was no 24-hour news channel, nothing happened.” He cited the fact there were only two bookings in this game, ignoring that there were two separate flash points when police and fluorescent-jacketed security guards had to separate the players. Most pathetically of all, there were suggestions later on it was actually Evra who withdrew his hand. It was claptrap and, wisely, nobody from Anfield dared say it on the record.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/feb/11/liverpool-kenny-dalglish-luis-suarez