Luis Suarez’s ban for biting Giorgio Chiellini at the 2014 World Cup still rankles with his Uruguay team-mates, as Diego Godin says the "unjust” punishment saw the Barcelona striker “kicked out like a dog”.
FIFA suspended the fiery frontman for nine international games and from all football activity for four months following his infamous coming together with an Italian defender during a group stage game.
Suarez was able to secure a big-money transfer from Liverpool to Barcelona while stuck on the sidelines, but his World Cup was prematurely brought to a close and he missed out on the 2015 Copa America.
Godin believes authorities came down too hard on the 31-year-old, despite his previous misdemeanours, with Uruguay’s collective dreams dashed as they went on to lose 2-0 to South American rivals Colombia in the last 16.
The Atletico Madrid defender told The Guardian: "I’m convinced that if what happened against Italy hadn’t happened it would have been a different story.
"First, we lost our best player. Second, everything that happened affected us: it affected Luis and the rest of us. It was very hard to live through that, to see him dead, crying, fallen, kicked out of the World Cup.
"The whole country was sunk, indignant – and that was all we talked about until the Colombia game."
Godin added on the Suarez incident which led to him being removed from the Uruguay camp: "I’m not going to say he didn’t make a mistake – he’s admitted that himself – but I still feel the same as most Uruguayans, most people in football who look at it objectively. It was very, very, very unjust.
"For an ‘assault’ you get maybe four games. They took him out the World Cup, kicked him out like a dog. He wasn’t allowed at the Copa América. It was disproportionate, unjust, and no one will take that indignation from us."
While Suarez has made unfortunate headlines on a regular basis throughout his career, Godin believes that it is his enigmatic personality on the field which has carried the prolific goalscorer to the very top of the game.
He added: “Luis has got where he is because of the way he is: you see he gets angry, wound up, he fights, protests, competes.
“If he wasn’t like that, he wouldn’t be the player he is.”
Suarez will be back on a World Cup stage on Friday when Uruguay open their Russia 2018 campaign against an Egypt side still hoping to have Mohamed Salah within their starting XI.
