Interesting piece by Suarez in today's Guardian talking about Stevie.
For me the key message is actually how cynical we have to become in order to win things consistently. Our successful teams in the past were good at gamesmanship. The Suarez approach to the game is more successful in league campaigns than Stevie's.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/nov/05/luis-suarez-chelsea-liverpool-jose-mourinhoLuis SuĂĄrez says Chelsea player was uneasy over time-wasting at Anfield
Luis SuĂĄrez has claimed that one of Chelseaâs players expressed misgivings about JosĂŠ Mourinhoâs time-wasting tactics when they played at Anfield last season in the game where Liverpoolâs title challenge started to unravel.
SuĂĄrez says he approached the player, who he does not name, to voice his own irritation about the ultra-defensive way in which Mourinho had set up his team for Chelseaâs 2-0 win, described by Brendan Rodgers as âparking two busesâ in front of goal.
âEvery coach plays the way that suits him, so I donât mind that,â SuĂĄrez writes in his new autobiography, Crossing The Line. âThe only thing I didnât like was the way that they wasted time from the very start. I was asking myself: âWhy are they doing this from the first minute?â I even asked one of their players. âWhat do you want me to do? If he makes us play like this, I have to play like this,â he replied. âWhat else can I do? If I donât, I wonât play. What would you do?ââ
Liverpool play Chelsea at Anfield again on Saturday for the first time since that crucial encounter in April and SuĂĄrez recalls how Steven Gerrard was so distraught about the slip that let in Demba Ba for the opening goal that he was unable to travel to the Professional Footballersâ Association dinner that night.
âIf I had been in Stevieâs shoes, I donât know if I would have been able to carry on playing,â the Barcelona striker recalls. âEmotionally, it must have been very, very hard.
âIn the previous weeks, so much had been said about him, the expectation had built so much, the talk had been about him leading Liverpool, his club, to a first title in over 20 years, on the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, in which his cousin had died, and then that happens. The captain, the former youth-teamer, the one-club man, a Scouser born and bred, and he was the unlucky one to make a crucial mistake.
âHe still hadnât won the league title. Stevie had started to believe, we all had. And now it had been virtually taken away from him and like that, with him slipping against Chelsea. Iâm convinced that if Chelsea had not scored like that, they would not have scored at all. And once you are a goal down against them, itâs virtually impossible.â
SuĂĄrezâs book, released on Thursday, reveals that he made the mistake of starting to think Liverpool had virtually won the league, asking one of their coaches whether there was anything special planned at the end of the season, and hearing other players openly talking about it.
âWe had gone into the game knowing that a draw was good for us. With the atmosphere at Anfield, with the fact that we had just beaten [Manchester] City, our attitude remained the same: we wanted to win. But we were conscious of the fact that with a draw we were still ahead of everyone. What I didnât expect was for them to play for the draw. Itâs true that they won the game but I am convinced that without that stroke of luck, they would not have scored.
âWe knew that some of the normal [Chelsea] starters werenât going to play, but we also knew that if they wanted to win the league â and people forget that they still had a chance to do that â they would have to play to win. For them to try to waste time when the draw was no good to them was something that I didnât understand.
âWe didnât play that well, but I honestly think that there was nothing we could have done differently. We had 10 players in front of us, almost all of them in the penalty area. We could try a one-two, or move the ball quickly from player to player to try to pull them out of position, seeking to create some space, but then there would always be another defender in front of us.
âItâs very hard when you see that there is no space to move into. Meanwhile, every time we looked up at the clock, time was running out.
âThe way that they seemed to be playing with the clock frustrated us. They tried to wind us up, I think, and we were drawn into that. âCome on, hurry up.â We should not have been dragged in.
âMourinho knew: if you waste time, if you break it up from the very start, theyâre going to get frustrated, theyâre going to play a bit more crazily, theyâll do anything. They pulled us out of our normal routine. And, of course, we never imagined the slip and that was what truly made it hard for us. Nor did they. You canât plan for a player to slip.â