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The shockwaves will have been felt from the Maracana in Rio, to Melwood back in Liverpool, as Luis Suarez received a four-month ban from all football-related activity and was suspended for Uruguay's next nine matches. Uruguay's talisman has been removed from their World Cup reckoning for biting Italy's Giorgio Chiellini and Liverpool will be without arguably the Premier League's finest player until November. Fifa needed to act swiftly and decisively and has done so on an unprecedented scale at a World Cup.

FIFA have yet to tell the Reds whether suspension for biting prevents striker Barcelona now hope to buy on the cheap from training at Melwood Liverpool have joined the Uruguayan FA in considering legal action against Fifa after it hit Luis Suarez with a four month ban from football for his biting shame. Suarez's Liverpool career is in the balance after he was punished for his bite on Italy's Giorgio Chiellini. The striker was due back in Uruguay this morning, after being told to leave his team's World Cup base. Liverpool are furious that Fifa included a four month ban...

RECIFE, Brazil — The U.S. national soccer team advanced to the next round of the World Cup on Thursday, thanks in part to a handsome and talented chap playing 850 miles away. While the Americans failed to control their future, losing to Germany, 1-0, at soggy Arena Pernambuco, Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo scored a late goal to all but end Ghana’s hopes of catching the United States in the Group G standings.The Americans (1-1-1) finished second in the so-called Group of Death, even on points with Portugal (1-1-1) but well ahead on the first tiebreaker, goal difference. The United States...

President Obama watched some of Thursday’s World Cup match in which Germany defeated the U.S. 1-0 while flying to Minnesota aboard Air Force One. Photographers traveling with the president were ushered back into the conference room to catch a glimpse of Obama and other senior staff members watching the game. Presidential advisers Valerie Jarrett and Dan Pfeiffer were at the table, as were press secretary Josh Earnest and staffers Anita Decker Breckenridge, David Simas, and Dag Vega. The presidential watch party didn't prove good luck for the men's team, but the U.S. still advanced to the next round of the...

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Can two defensively suspect teams settle on a needed draw? If Team USA and Germany simply equal each other’s goal tallies, both sides will go through to the knockout rounds. In most cases, it would be expected that the two sides should line up in highly defensive formations and show little adventure, committing only the minimum number of men to any attack. If both sides play defensively, the draw will come regardless of any conspiracy.The problem is, neither side is built to play the sort of boring, unadventurous soccer such a fixture requires. American fans are well aware of the...

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) -- FIFA has banned Uruguay striker Luis Suarez from all football activities for four months for biting an opponent at the World Cup, ruling him out of the rest of the tournament and the start of the upcoming Premier League season. The ban also covers Uruguay's next nine international games, which goes beyond the next four months and rules him out of next year's Copa America. FIFA also fined the Liverpool striker 100,000 Swiss francs ($112,000).

But, aside from the music, the American contribution to soccer has been minimal, and American interest in it even, er, minimaller. Every four years, the same bien-pensants who urge the Administration to be more "multilateral" and to work through the UN also commend the virtues of the World Cup: the game is supposedly more poetic than American sports, as subtle and nuanced as French foreign policy. But Americans like their international competitions to be international in the sense of the current "international coalition against terror" at Kandahar airbase - that's to say, overwhelmingly American but with a few token Canadians....

When the World Cup pairings were announced in December, the date U.S. Coach Juergen Klinsmann circled most prominently on his calendar was June 26, the group-play final against Germany. That's the country Klinsmann, the player, led to a World Cup title in 1990 and the one Klinsmann, the coach, led to a third-place finish in the 2006 World Cup. So playing against his homeland in his first World Cup as the American coach was something he both feared and embraced. Now that the game is at hand, though, Klinsmann says he's feeling another emotion: joy. "This is going to be...

Unfortunate as it was to see Luis Suarez revert to his old ways and bite Giorgio Chiellini during Uruguay's 1-0 win over Italy at the World Cup, it did inspire plenty of hilarious memes in honor of soccer's most famous flesh eater. With Tuesday's shameful display, Suarez, who now faces disciplinary hearings, became a three-time biting offender and now risks a two-year ban as a result.   That's no laughing matter, but these Suarez-inspired memes are.

EXPERTS have stressed that Luis Suarez bit a large Italian footballer and not a tiny child. With many calling for the Uruguayan striker to be jailed, doctors said Suarez’s victim had already made a full recovery, despite pretending to be dead. Sports injury specialist, Dr Martin Bishop, said: “The key difference between biting an opponent and going in hard with your studs up is that biting them is much, much more interesting. “The actual biting injury is usually pretty mild. Mr Suarez is a medium-sized Uruguayan, not a Sumatran tiger.” Dr Bishop added: “If Mr Suarez had ran towards the...

A Norwegian football fan has scooped a cool £500 after betting on Luis Suarez to bite somebody at the World Cup in Brazil. Suarez has twice been spotted biting opponents in recent years, so the punter thought he’d put £3 on the striker to take a munch out of somebody at Brazil 2014. And low and behold, towards the end of Uruguay’s clash with Italy, he bit Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini – triggering the bookmaker to pay out. With odds of 175/1, it was a pretty amazing outcome, despite Suarez’s reliability for biting his rivals. See above for the betting...

Fifa has opened disciplinary proceedings against the Uruguay striker Luis Suárez after he appeared to bite Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini. “Fifa can confirm that disciplinary proceedings have been opened against the player Luis Suárez of Uruguay,” the body said in a statement. Suárez could face a ban of up to 24 matches if found guilty. The incident occurred during Uruguay’s 1-0 victory over Italy, a result that knocked the 2006 champions out of the World Cup. With the score at 0-0, Suárez leaned into Chiellini before appearing to bite his opponent’s shoulder. Suárez was not punished by the referee but Fifa...

Uruguay's Luis Suarez has been accused of biting a player for the third time in his career after an incident with Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup. The Liverpool striker lunged at Italy defender Chiellini shortly before Diego Godin scored to give Uruguay a 1-0 win. Chiellini pulled his shirt down to show the referee a mark on his shoulder but no action was taken by the official. The maximum ban Suarez could face if governing body Fifa takes retrospective action is 24 matches or two years.

Looks like Mike Tyson isn’t the only one willing to take a bite out of his opponent in order to win:

SNIP McDonald’s Uruguay was quick to react to the opportunity with a little “real-time” marketing, inviting Mr. Suarez for a Big Mac hamburger via Twitter. “Hello @luis16suarez, if you are hungry come to have a bite of a big Mac,” a loose translation of the message read. SNIP

LUIS SANCHEZ BITES OPPONENT IN WORLD CUP This is the third time Suarez has bitten an opponent during a game. Unlike Bill Clinton, three was not a rape involved.

The vice-president of Fifa has called on the organisation “to fully investigate” match-fixing after an investigation found that the president of Ghana’s football association agreed that the national team would take part in games others were prepared to rig. Jim Boyce said that anyone involved in football match-fixing should be given heavy jail sentences and barred from the game for life. His comments came as Fifa announced that it was “evaluating the matter” and said that Ghana had reported the investigation by The Daily Telegraph and Channel Four’s Dispatches programme to the governing body. The World Cup organiser said it...

Police on horseback and clad in riot gear arrested several rowdy soccer fans as they worked to disperse crowds who poured into the streets of Huntington Park on Monday following Mexico’s latest win in the World Cup. Huntington Park police, with support from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said they arrested four people, including two for public intoxication, one for hurling a bottle and another for refusing to leave the area. Significant traffic delays were reported across the city. Authorities closed off several blocks of the heavily trafficked Pacific Boulevard shopping corridor north of Florence Avenue. Drivers were advised...

Spain and their tiki taka might be out of the World Cup, but The Straits Times' Tiki and Taka are still going strong in the Straits Times Hamster Cup. The two hamsters have so far gone head-to-head to predict two fixtures, and even more incredibly, got both results right. They first played out a Uruguayan victory over England, and then a draw for the fixture between Portugal and USA. Sure, they might not have got the scores spot on, but cut them some slack. They are hamsters after all. They are supposed to just eat their seeds and nuts, go...