Suarez lost to exhaustion and history’s familiar force

WHEN Alfredo di Stefano got off the plane in Spain, he was meant to be a Barcelona player. That was the deal struck between the Catalans, di Stefano’s playing club Millonarios of Colombia and Argentina’s River Plate, who owned his rights, incidentally nicknamed Los Millonarios…

He ended up playing for Real Madrid.

Different historians provide different reasons as to why this would have been the case. Most within Catalonia point to Franco’s close ties with Los Merengues and his desire to turn the club into a symbol of a powerful Spain.

Europe had isolated his nation, and he would use the club to build bridges and prove a certain superiority. Franco pulled a few strings, most likely snapped a few of them too, and in the end, despite FIFA’s sanctioning of a move to Barcelona, ‘The Blond Arrow’ would go on to represent the team in white.

Other accounts suggest a compromise deal had been struck where he would play for Real and Barca for a season each, but Barca, angered and driven by the conviction of its principles, turned it down.

Di Stefano went on to help Real build European club football’s first empire, powered by the right to rhetoric earned on halcyon nights, as they took their quick counter-attacking model and rapier like midfield, honed it, and applied it clinical precision.

When you ask most people about Real’s dominance in those early years they tend to not know, or brush it away as some kind of historical aside.

I can understand why. After all, we can’t add asterisks* when we talk, and we don’t want to sound like know-it-all-tossers, but we stand here today on the cusp of losing a player to a behemoth of an institution.

Barcelona’s motto is ‘more than a club’, Real’s should be ‘more than any other club’. And not because they mean more.

After all, our history is as thick, and Barcelona probably means more to its people. But the Santiago Bernabeu is home to a machine, a footballing bulldozer that pulls up trees and destroys homes. It chews out glittering careers on the verge of greatness and humbles men with its ego.

Mourinho is a tough nut to crack. So is Capello. By the time they finished their respective stints recently, they both came out in their last interviews like they had been shaken by the sights of the ghosts of impatience that walk the Bernabeu halls at night.

It amuses me that Jose Mourinho is back in England, but it does not surprise me. Jose himself is too ‘Latin’ a man to tolerate the counter-Latin-ness of the Italians and the Spanish. Those fiery tempers, those accusations of administrative partiality, those conspiracy theories and the newspaper wars.

Oh the newspapers wars! As Madrid’s Marca and Catalonia’s press go head-to-head, hyperbolic headlines are never in short supply. Every club, it seems, is lurching from one cyclical crisis to another. It might all be fun and games for us App refreshers and Twitter updaters, but for men in the pressure cooker, in the stadia and on the grounds, it can be cannibalism that can lose its morbid curiosity very quickly.

Jose is back in the safest of crazy environments, in England. The EPL might not be the ‘equal state’ that the Bundesliga is, nor have the cultural familiarities of Spain, but Jose knows that for all its huff and puff, the English media needs its bigger personalities more than the other way round. In Spain, it seems, the boards and the editors are a lot more cut-throat.

If Luis Suarez goes to Real Madrid, he should know that a couple of things.

One: if he honestly feels he can keep his instincts in check, Liverpool fans will be far quicker to forgive him than any others. And I’m sure though a lot of us aren’t celebrating his canines, we aren’t going out there to put him through the coals for it either. It’s largely been a case of shrug-and-move-on.

The media too can become surprisingly less drawn when there is a new flame in town. I can assure you, Luis, that all the paps you see camping outside your window will re-route their GPS when there’s another story of a fellow professional crashing his Aston Martin, or setting off firecrackers in his kid’s dollhouse.

All you have to do mate, is weather the tempest.

The second point connects to the article I wrote previously about how many experts are misjudging his scenario, like there’s a quick fix to it all. They say his problems are either through his upbringing, or cultural, or psychological.

It’s neither.

I think Luis is exhausted and needs a nice long rest. You carried a team for half a season and a nation for its World Cup qualifiers. You could not rest, and did not want to, even for the lesser cup games. You are almost never injured. You are always miserably happy on the field, and you are in a team that is going somewhere.

If I were Brendan Rodgers, before the double whammy of your desire to leave and Sturridge’s injury, I would look at those matches you’ll miss at the top of the season as games missed due to some parallel-universe injury. I’d look to ratchet up your hunger and maximise your freshness.

Luis, you are a unique footballer, and you will do well at Real. You will win a medal or two.

But they don’t know how to love at the Bernabeu.

Though remember this, if you do leave, which I think you will, you need to give the fans a bit of truth. Don’t give us the paparazzi excuse. We might give you the benefit of the doubt now, but once the dust settles, I am sure people will wake up to the fact that there is something about the lure…

So just tell us that: It’s Real Madrid.

As history has proven, they always get what they want.
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