Sports
Luis Suarez, the player who completed Atletico Madrid : ‘He will do anything to win’
A player who enjoyed so much of his success alongside Lionel Messi has become a talisman himself and the embodiment of everything Diego Simeone wants his side to be Luis Suarez has a mental technique he uses to ensure he is at his most frenetic. The Uruguayan focuses on perceived injustices, or previous controversies, to rile himself so he is at his rampaging maximum. Suarez has spoken about this himself, in his autobiography. “I find it hard not to over-dramatise the big matches,” he said in his autobiography. To still be able to give everything, to still care, but to just be able to play the game and not be so intense that I am practically living the match beforehand – that is the place I want to get to. There are more than enough dramas to dwell on from Suarez’s history with Chelsea. The London side subjected him to one of the defeats he considers the most painful of his career at Anfield in May 2014. Chelsea was also the opposition for one of the biggest controversies of that career when he bit Branislav Ivanovic. That is a sentence that still reads remarkably. It is an incident that still incites emotion in Suarez, particularly elements of the fall-out like David Cameron describing him as the “most appalling example”. It is this mindset that Diego Simeone has sought to tap into during their time together at Atletico Madrid. The Argentine coach has naturally played on the most recent “injustice”, which was Barcelona’s treatment of Suarez. In that regard, it’d be hard to find a better link-up of manager and player. They feel perfect complements to each other in terms of motivation and the capability to drive each other to higher levels In the manner of Roy Keane-Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruyff-Pep Guardiola and Guardiola-Xavi.