Luis Suarez - Non LFC

[Fivex]

Well it's not 30 assists but the stats are still impressive

[Phoenix07]

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suIc74Zlwas"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suIc74Zlwas[/ame]

[Shaggy]

Love him

edit - made me well up ffs

[meffin]

'kin hell, welling up at that

What a horrible, cheating racist he is

[Buzzo]

Jeez, a bit of an emotional watch. What a brave kid.

Suarez

I hope he gets his champs league winners medals for a couple of years, and then heads back to pull us out of the mire.

[Maxiedge]

yep welled up too. Had to pretend i had something in my eye while I power walked to the office bathroom to blow my nose

[Vermilion]

[Shaggy]

Great read this

Luis Suarez has liberated Lionel Messi, making him better than ever before

Lionel Messi has found a soulmate in Luis Suarez, writes Ken Early, and the Uruguayan's occupation of Messi's central role has elevated his Barcelona colleague to a new plane.

Neymar has already won the Puskas award, the Brazilian Golden Ball and South American Footballer of the Year, so Sports Photograph of the Year probably wouldn't mean much to him at this stage. But as an illustration of the dynamics of one of football's most famous dressing rooms, you'd struggle to improve on the picture he posted on Instagram after Barcelona beat Real Madrid 2-1 in March.

You know the one: Neymar and five Barcelona team-mates: Dani Alves, Rafinha, Douglas, Adriano and Lionel Messi. Five young Brazilians dressed exactly as you would expect football fashion victims who are about to hit the town after winning a big match to be dressed. Standing next to them, the greatest player in the world, wearing an outfit so aggressively, fantastically boring it seemed as though he must have been trying to make some kind of point.

Maybe Messi gets a kick out of this sort of thing. Napoleon used to go about in the uniform of a mid-ranking officer of the Guard, enjoying the contrast between his simple outfit and the gorgeous uniforms of the generals and aristocrats who surrounded him. Only somebody really important could get away with looking such a scruff in this company.

It's more likely Messi is a bad dresser because he couldn't care less about clothes. Unlike Alves and Neymar, who clearly desire to be seen as more than just great footballers, Messi only cares about being a great footballer.

[THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS, BUT WHO WILL BLINK FIRST, GUARDIOLA OR ENRIQUE?]

In the age of Neymar, Barcelona is no longer the club of conformist schoolboys Zlatan Ibrahimovic once complained about. But Messi needn't feel threatened. The soul of the club remains reassuringly square.

Luis Suarez came to Barcelona after a brilliant season at Liverpool in which his partnership with Daniel Sturridge brought 52 league goals - the highest total ever recorded by a strike pairing in a 38-game Premier League season. The tally is even more impressive when you consider that both players missed several games due to injury and suspension and neither scored a penalty all season.

The curious thing about it was that they achieved such an effective on-field connection despite a near-total absence of personal chemistry. They had nothing in common.

Last year, Sturridge was perceptively described in Vice magazine as "the only hipster footballer". His social media output is a study in ostentatious cool.

Suarez's idea of a cool thing to do is to get t-shirts printed up for himself and his two kids so that when they all stand next to each other, they form a sentence saying: "Happy Mother's day! We love you!" You suspect that if Sturridge and Suarez both had to describe their own personal hell, each one would look a lot like the other's life.

On the field their relationship was characterised by creative tension that often veered towards open hostility. Suarez was always ready to berate his colleagues for botching a pass or shooting when he thought he was better placed - a frequent Sturridge crime.

In many ways he was a horrible team-mate. But his snarling never became oppressive, because everyone could see it was the expression of a genuine passion for the game. You could see it in the joy with which he leapt into goal celebrations with Raheem Sterling or Philippe Coutinho: in those moments all was forgiven. Those young players strove so eagerly to live up to his standards that they nearly ended up winning the title.

The Luis Suarez who finally appeared in Barcelona's first team after serving the four-month biting suspension seemed at first a shockingly diminished figure. Tentative, deferential, anxious to please, arm permanently raised in apology - where was the maniac of Anfield?

For a few worrying games it looked as though Suarez might be falling victim to the same syndrome that had consumed the Barcelona careers of Ibrahimovic and David Villa. They had both struggled to figure out how to play in a team that had come to be dominated by the central attacking figure of Lionel Messi.

Playing well enough to win Messi's respect is difficult enough. Playing that well when you're being forced to perform out of position to accommodate Messi's desire to play in the middle is harder still.

Ibrahimovic couldn't take it and blew up almost immediately. He lasted one season. Villa clung on for three and wilted more gradually. By the time Neymar arrived in 2013, everyone could perceive the worrying pattern.

Neymar adapted cleverly. From the outset he made it clear that he was happy to play on the left. He wasn't going to step on any toes. He knew his place. His personal relationship with Messi was good. The only problem from Barcelona's point of view was that Neymar wasn't achieving much on the field. Nine league goals in his first season was a poor return. It wasn't working.

When Suarez eventually became available after the ban, Luis Enrique's first idea was to fit him in on the right. He set up a goal for Neymar inside three minutes of his first start against Real Madrid. Three more assists followed in the next four games. But there were still no goals.

In the sixth game, against APOEL Nicosia, Luis Enrique did something brave. He asked Messi to move to the right to accommodate Suarez at centre-forward.

It was brave because asking Messi to move out of the middle is really asking a lot. That's not so much because Messi is selfish, as because he has to live up to a unique set of standards. He has scored at the rate of a goal a game for the last six seasons. If he is not scoring a goal a game, everyone starts asking what's wrong with him. Simple football logic dictates that if you are not playing in the middle, it's harder to score.

Messi hasn't agreed to everything Luis Enrique has asked him to do this season, but maybe he went along with this idea because he gets on with and respects Suarez, his fellow football-obsessed square.

After 27 minutes against APOEL, Suarez scored the first goal of his Barcelona career. That was significant, but perhaps not as significant as the fact that Messi then proceeded to score a hat-trick from the wing.

Since that night Suarez has been playing in the middle, with Messi on the right. Barcelona have played 36 games, losing two, drawing two, and winning a scarcely believable 32. Messi has scored 34 goals with 15 assists, Neymar has 20 goals with three assists, Suarez has 23 goals with 12 assists, and the initial anxiety has been swept away by his obvious and immense joy at having finally established himself on the grand stage he has been working towards all his life.

Suarez's success shows that Pep Guardiola wasn't wrong to seek a penalty box "reference point" when he signed Ibrahimovic. He just signed the wrong player. The Swede once angrily informed Guardiola that at 100 kilos, he wasn't built for running around all day. Messi, who runs less than any top forward in the game, needs the players around him to move.


Suarez's irrepressible energy and deceptive power has turned out to be the perfect complement. Suarez beats up the defenders, runs them into the ground, opens up the spaces for Messi to do his work. Paradoxically, by taking over the central attacking position in which Messi had excelled for several years, the Uruguayan has liberated Messi to become an even more dominant figure in the play.

Messi is not stuck out on the right wing in this set-up, he's just starting out there and drifting to wherever he thinks he can be most effective. After several seasons in which he seemed to be evolving into a pure goalscorer, his new role is allowing him to express the full staggering range of his talents as a creative playmaker.

He's no longer just the cutting edge of the team. He's the hub around which the entire attack revolves. He didn't score in the home leg against Manchester City, but the performance was one of his best for years. Incredible as it is to say it, he looks a better player than ever. Maybe the goal-a-game years were just the prelude to the truly imperial phase to come.

Last night, Pep Guardiola ruefully claimed that in this form, Messi can't be stopped. As so often, the Bayern manager is probably right.

[Paddy]

****ing legend. Hope he wins the CL this year against Juve in the final, whilst nutmegging the hell out of Evra. Chiellini probably deserves to hatchet him, but hope Luis wins.

[Marina]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suIc74Zlwas

Lovely. What a sweet kid. And Luis! I miss you.

[shanks69]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suIc74Zlwas

wow

[baitman]

that vid

[DeanoUK]

Ah ****, welled up at that one.

[baitman]

such a [golden] shower of pussies

is the collective noun a fannyfart of pussies

[Doc_Piptorious]

Probably would have bitten the kid if he was in the same room.