The Broken Clock and his Scapegoat

We may never know how Brendan Rodgers ended up with Mario Balotelli in his squad. Perhaps the Northern Irishman issued an ultimatum to the Fenway Sports Group. Perhaps they saw through this act, called his bluff and decided to pursue the Italian anyway, forcing Rodgers to back down. Perhaps the Liverpool manager was politically savvy enough to avoid engaging in a political battle against men who have more experience than him.

We do know two things however; firstly, Brendan Rodgers would have preferred to finish the summer short of attacking options than with Balotelli on board. Secondly, Brendan Rodgers is not a proud man.

At the beginning of August the Liverpool boss ridiculed the suggestion that the club would make a move for the nomadic 23 (at the time) year old.

“I can categorically tell you Mario Balotelli will not be at Liverpool,” Rodgers promised.

Less than three weeks later the two men were sat alongside each other. Balotelli was only at the club for a matter of hours but he was already listening to his new manager publicly admit this was a considerable gamble.

"Time will tell. Of course it is a risk. I am not going to say it wasn't but he knows he needs to fit into our culture. There are no big egos or 'Big-time Charlies' in our squad. We have got to the Champions League because we are a team”

Mario Balotelli has never prioritised the collective.

Rodgers’ tone quickly became even more damning; other forwards refused to move to Merseyside or were unavailable so they settled on the Milan marksman.

Before Christmas, with the Italian nursing a groin injury, Rodgers continued to cast doubt on the deal’s logic.

“I felt it was a risk we needed to take with Mario because, as a group, we couldn’t afford not to at that time. It was obviously late on and we needed to have someone in. It’s something we can’t regret now. I made it clear at the beginning it was a calculated risk”.

‘It’s something we can’t regret now’ translates to ‘it’s something we regret’ in human.

Having steered Liverpool to the cusp of their first Premier League title in decades Rodgers possessed a level of political clout only Rafa Benitez could match in the last twenty on Merseyside. The Anfield crowd revered him and cherished the invigorating, kamikaze football that ultimately cost them the title; eight books celebrating the title challenge were released the following summer.

A prouder manager would have been hell-bent on insisting that, while accepting the club’s policy of working in line with a transfer committee, he could veto a signing if he was convinced it would turn toxic.

One can see however why Rodgers failed to back his own judgement and refuse the signing. Martin Skrtel, Lucas Leiva and Jordan Henderson are just a few of the players Rodgers lost faith in during his reign but went on to prove his initial judgement was flaky. One of the pillars behind Liverpool’s recent success has been FSG’s refusal to shape the squad to please their manager.

The Americans declined the option of shifting captain-elect Jordan Henderson on to Fulham as bait for Clint Dempsey; they refused to pay for Gylfi Sigurdsson when the former Swansea manager was desperate for a playmaker, holding out for Philippe Coutinho the following winter instead. According to Tony Evans of The Times, FSG forced through with the acquisition of Daniel Sturridge despite Rodgers concerns.

That all the players mentioned have become integral to the team is testament to their managers’ ability to creatively find a role in his high octane set-up for each of them, and also his ability to accept his own wrongdoing.

The presence of Lucas and players Rodgers has publically criticised like Simon Mignolet and Fabio Borini, in Liverpool’s starting eleven at the moment highlight how he has yet to cross the rubicon with his questionable man management techniques.

If anyone isn’t going to tolerate public dressing downs however it is going to be Mario Balotelli. The Italian is far from the ornery man he is often perceived to be; his biggest fault is his insecurity. He is already an easy target whenever a scapegoat is required, however despite aging, his immaturity is still one of his most prominent traits.

The reason the Italian has and will continue to fail at the club has nothing to do with his mentality. Any striker would have been a downgrade after Luis Suarez’s genius insisted they challenge for the title last year but the only intelligent action to take would have been to pursue a player (albeit an inferior one to Suarez) who at least plays in the same mold as the Uruguayan.

Suarez was a leftist striker. He pressed, created and defended; his presence elevated the ability of every one of his teammates. Balotelli is inherently right wing in footballing terms; he will never sacrifice himself in the way his predecessor did regularly.

Fortunately for Liverpool fans their manager has reverted to the style of play that suited their slight, intricate footballers last season; rapid one-twos, the freedom to roam, relentless runners from deep.

Unfortunately for Mario, he will never belong in this style. Brendan Rodgers judged this one to perfection. 

The Uruguayan Malandro

The ball is sent flying towards the Anfield sky as a result of Jose Enrique’s direct, almost primitive pass, arcing through the air with the resemblance of a clay pigeon in both its flight and its inevitable fate as an obsolete object. Luis Suarez is relentlessly fixated on this lost cause, he knows more than most what can come from these hopeless beings. Bisecting Newcastle’s central defensive pairing Liverpool’s number seven charges towards the precise blade of grass his target will drop onto at full speed. Frankly however, to collect the ball in this manner would be too easy, too predictable, unspectacular, everything Luis Suarez is not. Neck distorted, a gaze glued to the ball above him and the harrying Argentine defender Fabio Coloccini jostling alongside him for field position, the odds are stacked against him, yet Suarez succeeds, cushioning the ball onto his toe as if he had a pillow from the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton spreading out from his sternum to his shoulders. If ever a moment that highlighted how technically gifted one of the most controversial players in the game is this was it. If ever a moment that highlighted just how mentally gifted Luis Suarez is, this was also it.

Luis Suarez is a genius football fans must cherish. As he watched over the left shoulder he has carried half of his Liverpool teammates on for the past twelve months at the ball twenty foot in the air his mind was completely aware of what he was going to do next, unlike the rest of the 45,000 in the iconic stadium that evening. The passionate former Ajax captain has the mental capacity to rapidly decipher these seemingly impossible sporting puzzles with ease, a talent which separates him from all but a handful of footballers worldwide and which, over the past twelve months, has seen him begin to etch his name into the upper echelons of footballers the spectators of the Premier League have been lucky enough to watch. Without looking, the Pibe from across the River Plate knew (precisely to the inch) that by the time the ball had been magically transferred to his right foot Tim Krul would be waiting to tragically ruin his masterpiece. While capturing a millisecond’s glance of the Dutchman a message had been sent to El Pistolero's brain that Krul was shaping his body to spread out in order to maximise the area of his net he could protect. No sooner had the message been sent than the response was instinctively sent back to his foot. Innovatively, and ironically, the striker who some said couldn’t hit the target did not need too. When you possess the unique guile Suarez has in abundance you can walk the ball in at times.

All Luis has ever known was football, which partly explains his be all and end all attitude which infuriates opposition fans game after game but has cemented his status as a figure of reverence for those on The Kop.  At the age of four the future Uruguayan star was as comfortable and quick running with the ball as he was without it, testament to his father Rodolfo who himself had been a professional winger in Uruguay and Brazil. Suarez struggled to cope with both the separation of his parents and the poverty which was a result of it, with his mother Sandra left as the house’s sole earner and bearing the responsibility of supporting her seven children in the town of Salto on the Argentine border. Wilson Piriz, a Nacional scout who spotted Luis's blatant talent understood the boy lacked the maturity of others even at his age. "Life was difficult for him, he wasn't quite mentally ready. But his tough childhood made him hungry to succeed". 

A list of the virtuoso’s past misdemeanours flow effortlessly right throughout his career, beginning in his homeland where at the age of fifteen after a red card he head-butted a referee, while there was also a spell where he was more likely to be found enjoying the city nightlife than developing his talents on the training field. Two instrumental figures in Suarez’s life have kept him (somewhat) in check. His brother Paulo has placed more importance on his younger brother’s career than his own, firstly when Luis was spiralling out of control at Nacional as a youth (even physically beating him up on one occasion) and then when he moved to Holland despite being under contract at Isidro Metapan in El Salvador because the younger Suarez was struggling mentally as a result of living away from home despite starring in Amsterdam. "I gave up five months of football, but I felt he needed me". Sofia Suarez meanwhile is the reason her husband moved to Groningen from the Montevideo giants Nacional at the tender age of nineteen after earning his first domestic title in Uruguay, scoring ten goals in the process. “The only thing I thought about was being by her side again". Luis’ infatuation with his best friend ensured that as soon as a move closer to her in Europe (where she had been living for a year) was first mentioned he was 100% committed towards challenging himself abroad.   "That’s how my European adventure started. When I got the call to play in Europe I didn't think twice".

Had Suarez been born to the north in Brazil he would have been the chief Malandro, a figure of Brazilian folklore. The Malandro is completely free to roam around the pitch as he pleases adhering to nothing except his own intuition. He is a master of manipulation, capable of making the defender anticipate one action only to outrageously invent a new method of belittling him. Eventually you trap the deceitful master of fraud into a corner yet just as you begin to congratulate yourself for capturing him he has disappeared; carefully caressing the ball between your legs and swerving his body beyond you. The panna (nutmeg) is this Malandro’s favourite trick, as it highlights the effervescent peasant’s dominance over his contemporaries and plants a fertile seed of doubt into the defender’s mind rendering him utterly useless.

Luis Suarez entered 2012 as the most vilified player in Britain. However it’s integral to the game that people separate Luis Suarez the individual from Luis Suarez the artist. Suarez will continue to exaggerate contact, lecture the man in black on how to control the game and punch the ground in disdain when a less-gifted teammate fails to follow his unorthodox script, but to drain him of these features would be extracting the entertainment he brings to the Premiership. He struggles to understand why others are less intelligent than him on the pitch; the game comes easy to Suarez. One of the sport’s pioneering professors Anatoly Zelentsov, who worked alongside the great Valeriy Lobanovski during his stints at Dynamo Kiev, regularly ran players through various tests with the help of computers, like navigating mazes through memory in order to gauge attributes including coordination, reactions and of course memory. While these tests are extraordinarily difficult to the average human being sportsmen prospered due to their incredible mental capabilities. The Uruguayan would top the Ukrainian madmen’s class.

When spectators require entertainment there is no player in England capable of matching Suarez. He is compulsive viewing, possessing the cerebral brilliance to light up stadiums in ways we failed to even imagine on a pitch so frequently that it fails to surprise us nowadays as we turn to a new year. He has fearlessly carried Liverpool over the past twelve months with various acts of raw, pure beauty ranging from flawlessly lifting the ball fifty yards over a goalkeeper to embarrassing a defender with an inconceivable nutmeg before bending a shot with the outside of his foot past the helpless keeper with precision. Suarez, the footballer, is the type of player who inspires children to pick up a ball and dare whether it be out the back garden, on the street or in their sitting room. There is no more watchable player in England at the moment, no player single-handedly clawing his team to a respectable league position like the man people love to hate. Luis Suarez transforms the ordinary to the sublime so often that he has transformed the sublime to the ordinary over the past year and yet some still don’t regard him as a figure of reverence. They are the lost causes Luis will inevitably convert this year.