Luis Suarez has given an interview to his former teammate to Jamie Carragher for the Daily Mail in which he has made the stunning revelation that playing with Leo Messi and Neymar is more liberating than carrying a team featuring Stewart Downing. Whilst Suarez says he loved life at Liverpool, the pressure that came with being the main man is something he has been glad to cast off at Barcelona:
I’d have to say I enjoy myself a lot more, really. I don’t feel so much responsibility as I did in other teams. It felt sometimes at Ajax and Liverpool that it had to be me. Now, every time I go out on to the pitch, I enjoy myself and laugh. I have gone through too many difficult times in my career and I don’t want to keep thinking about them.
That’s why, right now, I just want to enjoy every minute. I never imagined I would be playing with these players in the best team in the world. At Liverpool I enjoyed it a lot. I laughed a lot. We laughed a lot, didn’t we? But, at the same time, I felt a lot of responsibility. Perhaps that affected me the wrong way sometimes.
Branislav Ivanovic would testify to the sentiment expressed in the last part of that statement.
Elsewhere in the interview, Suarez reveals the player he admired most as a child: Gabriel Batistuta.
The ultimate? Gabriel Batistuta. He was a spectacular No 9 - great at finding space, shooting from outside the box, good in the air. He was always a reference for me and I used to watch the way he played. He took free-kicks as well. I don’t get to take them here! But I’d copy him and watch videos of him all the time.
Suarez admits that he left Liverpool to win the Champions League and while he is clearly revelling in life at Barca, he did hint that he was becoming slightly bored with the whole facile enterprise of La Liga when asked if he missed anything about the Premier League:
The atmosphere at the games. In the Premier League you never really know what is going to happen. There is very little between the teams. Here, three or four teams aside, there is a difference with the smaller teams. I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful but there are some games where you look at the press and they are asking: ‘Let’s see how many goals Barcelona are going to score today?’ In the Premier League, you never know what is going to happen and that is something I miss.
And the atmosphere inside the stadiums, for all that it was often criticism of me. The support of the people in Anfield was incredible… Sometimes I’d go to Anfield and think: ‘Uff! There’s a game today’. You might not be in the best mood or be up for the match - but then I remember we’d go out to warm up and it would totally change my mentality. I’d be thinking to myself: ‘I have got to score two or three today.’ The way the people transmitted that to the players was incredible.
We recommend you read the entire interview if only for Carragher's poor attempt of tapping up Suarez in the event the former becomes Liverpool manager. You can do so here.
