CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Page About the Book About the Author Dedication Introduction: Crossing the Line 1. This is a Love Story 2. The Dutch School Referees 3. The Hand of Suárez Fame 4. Let’s go for 7 5. ‘Racist’ Fortune 6. The Rodgers Revolution Match Day 7. So Close Friends & Heroes 8. That was Anfield Management 9. England, my England Epilogue: The Callejón Acknowledgements Picture Credits Picture Section Index About the book Luis Suárez was a young boy already in love with football by the time his family moved from the countryside to Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. The guile and trickery of the street kid made an impact with the country’s biggest club, Nacional, before he was spotted by Dutch scouts who brought him to Europe. Suárez was lured from Ajax to Merseyside by another iconic number 7, Kenny Dalglish. From that moment, he terrorised Premier League defences, driving a resurgent Liverpool towards their most exciting top-flight season in 24 years. But there is another side to Luis Suárez: the naturally fiery temperament which drives his competitiveness on the pitch. There was the very public incident with Patrice Evra of bitter rivals Manchester United, and the biting of Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic, for which Suárez received eight-and ten-match suspensions respectively. Then during the World Cup finals in Brazil, in a physical encounter against Italy, he bit defender Giorgi Chiellini on the shoulder. Banned from football for four months, derided by the press, he left Brazil in the most testing of circumstances. In the summer’s final twist, he became one of the most expensive footballers of all time, moving from Liverpool to Barcelona. In Crossing the Line, Luis Suárez talks from the heart about his intriguing career, his personal journey from scrapping street kid to performer on football’s biggest stage, and the never-say-die attitude that sometimes causes him to overstep the mark. About the Author Luis Alberto Suárez Diaz was born in the Uruguayan city of Salto on January 24 1987. When he was seven his family moved to Montevideo and fell in love with football. Rapidly rising to a first-team position for locals Club Nacional de Football, it wasn’t long before he was plying his trade in Holland – first with Groningen and then superstars Ajax, where he was named Dutch Footballer of the Year and amassed one hundred goals for the club. In January 2011 Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish paid £22.8m pounds to secure Suarez’s services, making him the most expensive player for the club at the time. Suarez scored on his debut in front of the Kop, and wrote himself into Merseyside folklore. On 30 March 2014, he broke Robbie Fowler’s club record of 28 goals in a Premier League season, and won the Golden Boot, before moving to Spanish superstars Barcelona. At international level, he is Uruguay’s alltime record goalscorer. For Sofi, Delfi and Benja. I love you. INTRODUCTION: CROSSING THE LINE I knew straight away, as soon as it happened. When Godín scored I said ‘Gol!’ but on the inside everything was shutting down. I was happy that we had scored, and happy for my team-mates that we were going through, but I didn’t want to think any more – thinking meant accepting what I’d done and what the consequences would now be. I had let people down. My coach Óscar Tabárez, ‘El Maestro’, was in a bad way in the dressing room because he knew what could happen to me now. I couldn’t look at my team-mates. I couldn’t look at the Maestro. I didn’t know how I could say sorry to them. He told me that after the game the journalists had asked him about the incident, and he’d told them that he hadn’t seen anything. My team-mates were trying to tell me that maybe the situation was not so bad. But I didn’t want to hear a single word of it. Two more days would pass before I had to leave Brazil, but in my head, I was already gone. I was at training the next day, still in this unconscious state of denial, not wanting to think about anything, much less face up to the need to apologise and accept the fact that I needed to get some help. Just as we finished the training session, the Maestro called me over. He had news. ‘This is the worst thing that I have ever had to tell a player,’ he said, hardly able to get the words out. At that moment I thought maybe the ban would be ten, fifteen or even twenty games, but then he said: ‘Nine matches’. That didn’t seem any worse than I had feared. But he wasn’t finished. ‘And you can’t set foot in any stadium. You have to leave now. You can’t be anywhere near the squad.’ I wanted to stay and support my team-mates. Even if I was not playing I wanted to try to make up for things in some small way. But there were representatives from FIFA at the hotel and the team manager, Eduardo Belza, had been informed that I had to leave the squad as soon as possible. They treated me worse than a criminal. You can punish a player, you can ban a player from playing, but can you prohibit him from being alongside his team-mates? The nine-game ban was to be expected. But being sent home and banned from all stadiums? The only reason I didn’t cry was that I was standing there in front of the coach when he told me the news. There was a meeting with the team afterwards back at the hotel. I wanted to speak to them during lunch, but I couldn’t. I was about to stand up and tell them to be strong, to keep going, to keep fighting, but I just couldn’t. Had the ban stopped at nine Uruguay matches – which, as would gradually dawn on me, is a heartbreaking two tournaments and two years out of international football – I might still have challenged it, but I would have understood it. But banning me from playing for Liverpool when my bans in England never prevented me from playing for Uruguay? Banning me from going to watch my nine-and ten-year-old nephews play a game of Baby Football? Banning me from all stadiums worldwide? Telling me that I couldn’t go to work? Stopping me from even jogging around the perimeter of a football pitch? It still seems incredible to me that, until the Court of Arbitration decreed otherwise, FIFA’s power actually went that far. They had never banned a player like that before for breaking someone’s leg, or smashing someone’s nose across his face as Mauro Tassotti did to Luis Enrique at the 1994 World Cup. They made a big thing of saying the incident had happened ‘before the eyes of the world’. Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi in a World Cup final in 2006 and got a three-match ban. I was an easy target, maybe. But there was something important I had to face up to: I had made myself an easy target. I made the mistake. It was my fault. This was the third time it had happened. I needed to work at this with the right people. I needed help. After my ten-match ban in 2013 for biting Branislav Ivanovi , I had questioned ć the double standards and how the fact that no one actually gets hurt is never taken into consideration. The damage to the player is incomparable with that suffered by a horrendous challenge. Sometimes English football takes pride in having the lowest yellow-card count in Europe, but of course it will have if you can take someone’s leg off and still not be booked. When they can say it is the league with the fewest career-threatening tackles then it will be something to be proud of. I don’t think I have ever actually injured a fellow professional. I know biting appals a lot of people, but it’s relatively harmless. Or at least it was in the incidents I was involved in. When Ivanovi rolled up his sleeve to show the ć referee the mark at Anfield, there was virtually nothing there. None of the bites have been like Mike Tyson on Evander Holyfield’s ear. But none of this makes it right. When I got home and saw the television pictures of my bite on PSV Eindhoven midfielder Otman Bakkal in 2010 I cried. I had just become a father to a young daughter, Delfina, and the thought that she would grow up to see that I had done this upset me more than anything else. My wife Sofi had been in the stands and she had not realised what had happened at the time. When she saw the footage she said to me: ‘What on earth were you thinking?’ I had to start trying to answer that question for myself. The adrenaline levels in a game can be so high; the pulse is racing and sometimes the brain doesn’t keep up. The pressure mounts and there is no release valve. In 2010 I was frustrated because we were drawing what was a very important game and we were on a bad run that would eventually lead to our manager Martin Jol getting the sack. I was angry with myself, and with the situation. I wanted to do everything right that day and it felt as though I was doing everything wrong. The pent-up frustration and feeling that it was my fault that things were not working out reached a point where I couldn’t contain it any more. That is also what happened with Ivanovi in 2013. We had to beat Chelsea to ć still have any chance of making it into the Champions League. It was a long shot anyway, but losing would mean that it was all over. I was having a terrible game. I gave away a stupid penalty with a handball and I could feel everything slipping through our fingers. I could feel myself getting wound up, getting angry with myself, saying to myself on the pitch: ‘How can you have been so clumsy there?’, or ‘How could you miss that?’ Moments before the Chiellini bite I had a great chance to put us 1-0 up. If I had scored that goal, if Buffon hadn’t made the save, then what followed would never have happened. I would not have done anything. Nothing. But I missed the chance. The pressure builds, the fear and the anger bubbles up inside: ‘We’re going out here, and we’re going out because of me.’ It’s suffocating. You don’t realise the magnitude of what you’re doing or what you might do. I’m not justifying what I did – no one ever could – but I am trying to explain what happens. I’m still trying to explain it to myself, to understand what happens and why. When the heart has stopped racing after the game it’s easy to look back and say: ‘How could you be so stupid? There were twenty minutes left.’ But out on the pitch with the adrenaline pumping and the tension mounting, you’re not even really aware of how long is left. You don’t know anything. All I could think was: ‘I didn’t score, we’re out of the World Cup.’ There are some players who in that position would have said: ‘Well, we’re out, but I scored two great goals against England. I’m the star.’ I could have asked to be taken off: ‘My knee is hurting again, I scored two in the last game, I did my best.’ But I don’t think like that. I wanted more. The feeling is very hard to explain. After everything you have done, you don’t want it to stop there; you want more, you can’t bear the thought of failure. It’s not that I want to win; it’s that I need to win. The fear of failure clouds everything for me – even the blatantly obvious fact that I have at least 20,000 pairs of eyes on me; it is not as if I am not going to be seen. Something closes down in my head. Logic doesn’t come into it anymore. Equally illogical is that it should be a bite. There was a moment in a game against Chile in 2013 when a player grabbed me between the legs and I reacted by punching him. I didn’t get banned for that. Nothing. Not one game. That’s considered a normal, acceptable response. There is no public outcry either. When I called Ivanovi after the incident in 2013 he told me that the police had ć come to see him and asked him if he wanted to press charges and thankfully he had said no. I’m grateful to him because the circus could have gone on for a lot longer. Punch someone and it’s forgotten, there is no circus. So why do I take the most self-destructive route? The problem with addressing this ‘switching off’ is that the switching off also happens when I do something brilliant on the pitch and, of course, I don’t want to lose that. I’ve scored goals and later struggled to understand how exactly I managed to score them. There is something about the way I play that is unconscious, for better and for worse. I want to release the tension and the pressure but I don’t want to lose the spontaneity in my game, much less the intensity of my style of play. Liverpool sent a sports psychologist out to see me in Barcelona after the Ivanovi incident and we spent two hours talking about what it felt like and what ć was going through my head at the time. He offered me his services and said that I could see him again if I wanted to, but I resisted. Part of it was the concern that this treatment would make me too calm on the pitch. What if the next time the ball goes past me, I just let it go past instead of chasing it. I’m the player who