Yesterday, the departures of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo from the World Cup – possibly for good – raised the question of how players will be remembered if they ultimately failed to deliver on football’s greatest stage.
Luis Suarez’s name is never mentioned in that discussion and not simply because the Uruguay striker does not stake a claim to being the ‘Greatest Of All Time’.
In spite of his country’s 2-1 victory over Portugal to reach the quarter-finals, and regardless of how far the South Americans progress in Russia, the 31-year-old’s reputation as a pantomime villain will always precede him.
There is no question that the bed Suarez now has to lie in is of his own making. Had he never played at international level, he would still be loathed for a host of misdemeanours that have blighted his career.
At Ajax came his first bite on PSV Eindhoven’s Otman Bakkal. During his three years at Liverpool, he was banned for racially abusing Patrice Evra and received a further 10-game suspension for another biting incident, this time involving Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic.
After that scrape he was offered anger management, but there was no outpouring of sympathy from the baying mobs.
Many of his ugliest moments have been reserved for the world stage. In 2010, he broke Ghanaian hearts with a deliberate handball on the line in the last eight, Asamoah Gyan subsequently missing the resulting penalty. Ghana had been on the cusp of becoming the first African nation to reach a World Cup semi-final.
If the barrage of criticism Suarez received then had an effect on him, by 2014 it had worn off again. This time, Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini was the victim of his untameable jaw, which resulted in a four-month FIFA ban that he feared would scupper his move to Barcelona.
The striker once claimed the reason he will never win a Ballon d’Or is because he’s not marketable enough. His personality is indeed synonymous with the darker side of football, the idea of winning at all costs regardless of the moral implications.
Yet, against Portugal, we were given a subtle reminder of why no-one ever wants to disregard Suarez entirely. There was something fateful about his link-up play with Edinson Cavani, the pair having been born within three weeks of each other in the small city of Salto. It was almost like a telepathic connection could be felt between the two of them.
Imagine for a moment, that despite being in the more difficult half of the World Cup draw, Uruguay were to go all the way and win it. Perhaps Suarez could finally then, and only then, be remembered more for his achievements than the controversy he has brought upon himself.
That hasn’t really been the case at Barcelona. At the Nou Camp, he has won three La Liga titles in four years, on top of four Copa del Reys and one Champions League. While he missed out on being a part of ‘peak Barcelona’ when they were at their dominant, world-beating best, he would not have been out of place in that line-up.
The sad truth is that in an era when the game is sensationalised to a point where many prefer the most dramatic of storylines to the action itself, Suarez’s character was defined long ago.
The Champions League final pitting the dastardly Sergio Ramos against the fairytale of Mo Salah proved that point. If players have to be cast into categories of ‘good vs evil’, then Suarez will likely be remembered in the latter category, when the reality may be somewhere in between.
