Luis Suarez talks about Steven Gerrard's slip and reveals discontent in Chelsea ranks about Mourinho's tactics

Luis Suarez has broken his silence on the “slip of the season”

Former Liverpool striker Luis Suarez has said that he doesn’t know how Steven Gerrard managed to carry on playing after that notorious slip against Chelsea, which perhaps went on to cost the Anfield club the Premier League (PL) title last season. Going into the encounter, Liverpool had been on top of the Premier League table with just 3 games left in the season.

But Gerrard’s slip, while receiving a pass in the first half which then allowed Demba Ba to capitalize and score the opening goal for Chelsea, resulted in Liverpool’s destiny being no longer in their hands, as Chelsea held on firmly to their 1-0 lead for most of the second half before securing a 2-0 win with almost the last kick of the match.

Suarez, who joined Barcelona in the summer for £75 million, believes that Gerrard’s blunder ultimately proved to be the decisive factor in the title race, with Manchester City taking advantage to be eventually crowned PL champions, and added that he wouldn’t have been able to continue playing had he suffered Gerrard’s fate.

In his autobiography, Crossing the Line, he says: “If I had been in Stevie’s shoes, I don’t know if I would have been able to carry on playing. Emotionally, it must have been very, very hard.”

“In the previous weeks, so much had been said about him, the expectation had built so much, the talk had been about him leading Liverpool, his club, to a first title in over 20 years, on the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, in which his cousin had died, and then that happens.”

“The captain, the former youth-teamer, the one-club man, a Scouser born and bred, and he was the unlucky one to make a crucial mistake.”

“He still hadn’t won the league title. Stevie had started to believe, we all had. And now it had been virtually taken away from him and like that, with him slipping against Chelsea.”

“I’m convinced that if Chelsea had not scored like that, they would not have scored at all. And once you are a goal down against them, it’s virtually impossible.”

Gerrard’s slip has been widely parodied in various media

Chelsea’s time wasting tactics frustrated us: Suarez

Suarez was scathing of Chelsea’s extremely defensive approach on the day, with it being very clear right from the very first minute that they not only had no attacking intent but also planned to waste as much as time as possible.

He said that he was quite surprised by Chelsea’s approach, especially with them still having had a decent chance of winning the league, and insisted that they wouldn’t have won if not for that unfortunate slip.

“We knew that if they wanted to win the league – and people forget that they still had a chance to do that – they would have to play to win. For them to try to waste time when the draw was no good to them was something that I didn’t understand.”

Chelsea players also disagreed with Mourinho’s tactics

He also revealed that the Chelsea players were themselves surprised with their manager’s time-wasting from so early in the match, referring to a conversation he had with one opposition player, who reportedly said that he had no option but to follow Mourinho’s orders as he wouldn’t be played otherwise.

“Every coach plays the way that suits him, so I don’t mind that. The only thing I didn’t like was the way that they wasted time from the very start. I was asking myself: ‘Why are they doing this from the first minute?’” Suarez added.

“I even asked one of their players. ‘What do you want me to do? If he makes us play like this, I have to play like this,’ he replied. ‘What else can I do? If I don’t, I won’t play. What would you do?”

“We didn’t play that well, but I honestly think that there was nothing we could have done differently. We had 10 players in front of us, almost all of them in the penalty area.

“The way that they seemed to be playing with the clock frustrated us. They tried to wind us up, I think, and we were drawn into that. “Come on, hurry up.” We should not have been dragged in.

“Mourinho knew: if you waste time, if you break it up from the very start, they’re going to get frustrated, they’re going to play a bit more crazily, they’ll do anything. They pulled us out of our normal routine.”