Anything but a clear victory at the PFA player of the year awards dinner for Liverpool’s Luis Suárez would be a surprise. (AFP)
Daniel Taylor/The Observer
The last time Luis Suárez’s name was read out at the player of the year dinner the great and the good of his sport, or at least a voluble number of them, delivered an entirely different verdict to the one he is entitled to expect when the Professional Footballers’ Association rolls out the red carpet for its annual event in Park Lane on Sunday night.
This is the award that really matters for the elite players and, that night, nobody could have been left in any doubt about the straining of the relationship between Suárez and English football. The previous weekend, he had clamped his teeth into Branislav Ivanovic’s arm before retreating with a make-believe limp that Walter Brennan would have been proud of.
Suárez, and Liverpool, had spent the previous season and a half arguing it was not true he was a man of elastic principles, and that it was a fallacy to think of him as a serial abuser of his position. At the Grosvenor, the compere read out the Premier League’s team of the year. The booing when it was Suárez’s turn was not the sort to rattle wine glasses. Yet it was still loud enough to make its point.
Reginald D Hunter did the same, targeting Suárez for the opening joke of his now-infamous routine, and nobody should be surprised if this year’s act, Kevin Bridges, decides against letting him off easily. Bridges is one of the great close-to-the-bone comedians on the circuit and if you have seen his live show you might remember his sketch about Danny Dyer.
Or what he imagines would have happened to John Terry had he not made it as a footballer. Terry, he concludes, would have been “the guy outside the pub in Tenerife going: ‘You lads want a free shot tonight? Free Sambucas, loads of girls, just say big JT sent you.’” Suárez is the comedian’s equivalent of an open goal.
Whatever you might think of him, he will be a fully deserving winner of the trophy Gareth Bale picked up a year ago. It is still bewildering, as it often is with Gordon Taylor, that the PFA collects the votes in March, rather than following the lead of the Football Writers’ Association award and holding off until the final week of the season, but Suárez’s fusillade of goals and the phenomenal menace he creates make him the outstanding candidate.
The master of his craft
An old Fleet Street colleague once told me never to use the word “genius” when it applied to sport. Suárez belongs to the small, elite band of footballers who tempt me to ignore that advice. He is the master of his craft, il miglior fabbro. Even if sometimes, it is too much genius, not enough common sense.
A private jet will take him to London after the colour and din of Liverpool versus Chelsea, Premier League first against second, red versus blue, and another day of torrential images at Anfield.
Anything but a clear victory at the Grosvenor would be a surprise and, having watched Fernando Torres’s plodding performance in Madrid, it is difficult not to compare Liverpool’s current talisman with the last striker Anfield adored. Torres has four league goals for a Chelsea team that has been restricted to 67 in total. Liverpool are four short of a century and Suárez is their first player to reach 30 since Ian Rush wore a shirt emblazoned with Crown Paints. Unfortunately for Torres, the blip that became a slump, and then a full-on decline, now appears to be just a way of life. To see him these days is to witness an artist who has fallen out of love with the easel.
The crowd at Estadio Vicente Calderón gave him a superstar’s ovation but the player Atlético Madrid’s fans remember is a memory. The sureness of touch is not there. The instinctive brilliance has gone and, after this long, it is difficult to believe it will ever fully return. El Niño is nothing more than a light breeze compared with the force of nature blowing through the Premier League in Liverpool’s colours.
Naturally, Suárez is always going to divide opinion and his uncommon blend of high skill, balance and improvisation does not make him immune to scrutiny when there are still times he appears to take his lead from Stephen Potter’s The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship. “We will try to do it in the right way,”
Brendan Rodgers said before the game at Norwich last Sunday. “I take great pride in winning in the most sporting way we can.” Then Suárez went into a tackle at Carrow Road that left him writhing in apparent agony. Until, that is, he noticed Liverpool had the ball and he was back to his feet, haring towards goal. A proper Easter miracle.
Suárez has a plaintive look, mostly reserved for referees, that reminds me of an old quote from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France. “Jacques Chirac,” he said, “could have his mouth full of jam, his lips can be dripping with the stuff, his fingers covered with it, the pot can be standing open in front of him. And when you ask him if he’s a jam-eater, he’ll say: ‘Me eat jam? Never.’” He is brilliant, though, in that modern, elusive centre-forward role, playing with a licence to roam and capable of scoring from any angle or distance, and the fact Patrice Evra has voted for the Uruguayan to win the PFA award speaks volumes bearing in mind the squalid piece of history that links them in the Liverpool-Manchester United enmity.
Coaxing the best
Evra has got his vote spot on and Rodgers has been so instrumental in coaxing the best from Suárez it is not entirely easy, if Liverpool maintain their position at the top of the league, to follow the theory that Tony Pulis has better credentials to be named manager of the year.
The clue is in the title. Pulis did not begin his prodigious work at Crystal Palace until the last week of November and what has happened there in the space of six months is beyond anyone’s reasonable expectations.
Yet Rodgers had considerable issues thinking back to those days last August when Suárez, without a flicker of embarrassment, blamed the English media for his wanting to leave Liverpool (simultaneously trying to orchestrate a move to Arsenal and paparazzi-centric London) and even his most devoted apologists must have realised their hero’s word was not as trustworthy as they had liked to imagine.
Rodgers was accused by Suárez of a series of professional mistruths and, looking back, there is no way Liverpool would be in their current position if their manager had misjudged the best way to deal with the challenge to his authority. That cannot have been easy without risking lasting damage to their relationship. Rodgers handled it impeccably, made it absolutely clear he would not bend, and it is all from there that everything has fallen into place.
What we have now is a player who gives the impression he would crawl over broken glass just for the chance to score another goal for his team.
The FWA award should follow next month and look out for an ITV documentary before the World Cup with an access all areas badge to his life outside of football, and hopefully with a little more insight than Being: Liverpool, television’s equivalent of Hello! magazine.
The key for Liverpool, now they have secured the Champions League football that Suárez has craved, is keeping him away from the teams at the highest end of that competition, because they are bound to come knocking at some stage.
