Liverpool must avoid the decrepit Luis Suarez like the plague.
Barcelona are going to terminate his contract, wrote Billy Hawkins at talkSPORT, and that has led to much speculation about where the star will continue his career.
The 33-year-old has been with the Catalan giants for six years, having made the switch from Liverpool to Spain in 2014, and now some want him back. They should be careful what they wish for.
Jurgen Klopp wouldn’t be getting the forward Barcelona paid €81.72 million for. They wouldn’t be getting the forward who scored 147 La Liga goals in 191 games as well as notching 74 assists. They wouldn’t be getting the forward who scored 82 times in 133 appearances for Liverpool.
They would be getting a decrepit shadow of Luis Suarez, who is still capable of the occasional act of brilliance but who has lost much of what made him brilliant.
Suarez was so great because you knew he’d die before he stopped chasing a ball for the side. He put every single fibre of his being into every single contest, and that’s what also led to him going too far and biting or spitting racist comments.
But he’s not the same player.
A knee injury picked up in January took four months of the season away from him, but it’s also the same knee that required another surgery at the end of 2018/2019. That double blow has robbed him of the movement that we loved so much and it’s killed his pace.
Playing for Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp isn’t easy, and as much as the romantic inside me would like to see Saurez back in red, the realist knows it won’t be like it was the last time.
We’d get frustrated when he wasn’t able to do the link-up play as well as Roberto Firmino.
We’d shout when his legs went and he couldn’t get on the end of a Trent Alexander-Arnold ball.
We’d groan when those darting runs were a little too slow, a little too obvious.
The man can still finish and there are flashes of the old Luis Suarez, but it’s not enough to carry out a role for Liverpool. And plus, the wages he’d want make any move to Anfield difficult on that basis alone.
Let’s just be content to remember what he was. Let’s not spoil the magic of Suarez on Merseyside by an ill-advised trip down memory lane.