One man doesn’t make a team, but a team can sometimes find it impossible to replace one player.
Luis Suárez and Liverpool are examples of that.
When Suárez led Liverpool’s forward line two seasons ago, the Reds ran rampant in English soccer. The club finished as the runner-up in the Premier League, a whisker away from its first league title in more than 20 years. Suárez, of course, was one player among 11, but his hunger for chasing down lost causes and turning plenty of them into game-winning goals made him the catalyst for the team’s performance.
After that season — and a World Cup in which he turned from hero to villain — Suárez engineered his departure from Liverpool. He had a buyout clause in his contract, and Barcelona paid it, spending $92 million to bring him to Spain.
It would be four months before he could play for anyone because he was banned for biting the shoulder of Giorgio Chiellini during Uruguay’s World Cup encounter with Italy. However, making up for lost time, Suárez ended up winning five trophies with Barcelona in 2015.
It is a team on which he scores almost as often as he plays. A hat trick and an assist by Suárez helped Barcelona to thrash Athletic Bilbao, 6-0, on Sunday, and he is the leading goal scorer in Spain this season.
Yet he is now more of a team player. How could he be anything else, when he shares the attack with Lionel Messi and Neymar on a team that includes Andrés Iniesta, one of the most exquisite players the game has ever seen?
Messi has insisted that winning the Ballon d’Or five times in his career has come down to the team he plays for. It is a team on which Suárez is still very much the newbie. New, but he also brings a new dynamic.
The Suárez of Barcelona is the same foraging, tenacious and confident character that he was at Liverpool (and before that at clubs in the Netherlands and Uruguay). He works hard, has an instinct to go for the jugular and possesses a scoring habit that can at times make him appear greedy, at other times sharing.
“Luis deserved to be at the Ballon d’Or with Cristiano, Neymar and me,” Messi said in Zurich when he received the trophy as soccer’s top player earlier this month. “He is the best No.9 in the world today.” For the record, Messi is a No.10, Cristiano Ronaldo wears No.7, and Neymar No.11. The numbers do not define them. Messi is the world’s most complete player, in any role he chooses. Ronaldo and Neymar strike mainly from the wings.
Suárez is a roving attacker, running where instinct takes him, often taking the brunt of tackles from behind as he seeks opportunities to strike or to open up space for others.
Again, Messi summed it up. “It is down to the chemistry between the three of us,” he said at the Golden Ball gala. “We’re friends on and off the field.”
The friendly trio shared 137 goals in 2015, despite Messi’s missing two months after injuring a knee in September. Their coach at Barcelona, Luis Enrique, deserves credit for persuading the trio to dovetail their efforts and for making the team more direct.
Barcelona still can play tiki-taka more quickly than anyone else. It still has Pep Guardiola’s philosophy of pressing opponents back on their heels and working feverishly to retrieve the ball within seven seconds of losing it.
But with three such forwards — and in particular Suárez, who will cover every blade of grass behind defenders — there is logic to the long pass, now and again.
No one talks of a single soccer phenomenon any more, although Messi is certainly that. And few question, as many of us did, how the team could work with three strikers all in the running for the Pichichi Trophy, the award for the top scorer in La Liga?
Actually, there is competition for that. Real Madrid’s front three of Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Gareth Bale is just as prolific, and especially so, now that Zinedine Zidane has taken over as coach, with the club scoring 10 times in his first two games in charge.
There is an imbalance in the Spanish league that allows Madrid and Barcelona to overrun others through strikers imported at a huge price. But there is also pleasure for fans seeing the heights that these two attacking lineups reach most weeks.
I say most weeks because this weekend, Suárez is likely to be in the stands, watching his team. He has bitten nothing but his own lip since settling into Barcelona, after serving his suspension in 2014.
Right now, however, Suárez faces a two-game suspension after a referee reported that he started a fracas in the tunnel after a Copa del Rey game against Espanyol.
The game had been feisty. Espanyol, its crosstown rival, tried to stop Barça through means both fair and foul. According to the referee, Suárez set off the postgame altercation by calling an Espanyol player “a waste of space.”
Worse things are said in the heat of game, but Suárez has lodged an appeal, insisting that those words never crossed his lips.
Fifteen months of good behavior appear not to sway the disciplinary panel. The reputation of Suárez goes before him, even after a season and a half in which he has offended nobody, apart from frustrated defenders who try everything in the book to stop him.
Source: NY Times
