Liverpool’s Luis Suárez Draws as Much Scorn as Love

Jon Super/Associated Press

Liverpool's Luis Suárez, center, in a familiar pose: on the turf and pleading with the referee for a foul. His supporters say he is treated unfairly, a victim of his reputation.

The Premier League, like any form of sporting conflict prone to tribalism, has long been home to divisive figures — players who have been loved and loathed in roughly equal measure.

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Suárez has seven goals in 10 games, the second-best total in the Premier League this year.

But few have stirred such powerful and contrasting feelings in fans as has Luis Suárez, Liverpool's Uruguayan forward, whose unique mix of skills and tumbles have guaranteed him a hero's status among Liverpool supporters and made him a villain to just about everyone else who takes an interest in English soccer.

Suárez, who leads his team's attack and is one of the elite players in the league, simply does not have the good fortune of being known and admired purely for his speed, balance, power and technique.

Instead, he is scorned as much as he is lauded, as his team's recent game with its crosscity rival, Everton, made clear. The match, which ended in a 2-2 tie, provided a microcosm of everything — the good, the bad and the ugly — that makes Suárez such a talking point in English soccer and such a constant in headlines in the British news media.

In that game, Suárez created his team's first goal, which he celebrated by running toward the Everton manager, David Moyes, and performing a theatrical dive right in front of him. It was a pointed response, and a somewhat clever one, to Moyes's eve-of-game suggestion that Suárez routinely dives to the ground in an attempt to deceive referees into awarding free kicks and penalties. (Somewhat embarrassingly for Moyes, the only player to be given a yellow card for diving during the game against Liverpool was Everton's captain, Phil Neville.)

Suárez then scored Liverpool's second goal, before committing a cynical foul on Everton defender Sylvain Distin — he stepped on his foot — that had Moyes contending afterward that Suárez should have been given a red card and banished from the game. As it turned out, Suarez got a yellow card and played on.

Suárez was later seen picking up a coin that had been hurled from the stands and tucking it inside his boot. And, as is typically the case with Suárez, he was then involved in the most controversial moment of the match, showing superb awareness to score what should have been a dramatic last-minute goal to win the game only to see the linesman belatedly, and quite incorrectly accordingly to television replays, signal that Suárez had been offside, which nullified the goal.

Welcome to the world of Luis Alberto Suárez Díaz, where you can be the sinned-against and the sinner all in the space of 90-plus minutes of work. It is a narrative that is becoming impossible to escape: every week, opposing managers and fans seem to criticize him, either before, during or after a match in which he invariably produces either the sublime or the ridiculous — or both.

But while Moyes contends the diving antics of players like Suárez could drive fans away from soccer, the man who brought him to Europe six years ago has a very different view.

Ron Jans signed the 19-year-old Suárez for the Groningen club he coached in Holland. Suárez had been playing for Nacional in his homeland but was eager to move to Europe to be nearer to his childhood sweetheart, Sofia Balbi, who is now his wife and whose family had relocated from Montevideo to Barcelona.

"I think he is one of the players who make people want to go and watch a football match," Jans said in a recent telephone interview. "He is a real winner, and while he sometimes does things I wouldn't do to win a game, and I hope Luis himself realizes that sometimes it is too much, everything he does is geared toward winning.

"Perhaps I cannot judge Luis objectively, because I know him as not only a great player — the best I have worked with — but also as a great person," Jans added. "I saw the dive he did in front of the manager from Everton and I thought, 'This is great,' because when you are criticized in the press, the best way to react is with a goal and with humor."

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