Luis Suárez claims Chelsea player disagreed with time-wasting at Anfield

Luis Suárez has claimed that one of Chelsea’s players expressed misgivings about José Mourinho’s time-wasting tactics when they played at Anfield last season in the game where Liverpool’s title challenge started to unravel.

Suárez says he approached the player, who he does not name, to voice his own irritation about the ultra-defensive way in which Mourinho set up his team for Chelsea's 2-0 win , described by Brendan Rodgers as "parking two buses" in front of goal.

"Every coach plays the way that suits him, so I don't mind that," Suárez writes in his new autobiography Crossing The Line. "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?’ 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?’”

Liverpool play Chelsea at Anfield on Saturday for the first time since that crucial encounter in April, and Suárez recalls how Steven Gerrard was so distraught about the slip that let in Demba Ba for the opening goal that he was unable to travel to the Professional Footballers' Association dinner that night.

“If I had been in Stevie’s shoes I don’t know if I would have been able to carry on playing,” the Barcelona striker recalls. “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.”

Premature belief

Suárez’s book, released today, reveals that he made the mistake of starting to think Liverpool had virtually won the league, asking one of their coaches whether there was anything special planned at the end of the season.

“We had gone into the game knowing that a draw was good for us. With the atmosphere at Anfield, with the fact that we had just beaten [Manchester] City, our attitude remained the same: we wanted to win. But we were conscious of the fact that with a draw we were still ahead of everyone. What I didn’t expect was for them to play for the draw. It’s true that they won the game but I am convinced that without that stroke of luck they would not have scored.

“We knew that some of the normal [Chelsea] starters weren’t going to play, but we also 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.

“We didn’t play that well, but I honestly think that there was nothing we could have done differently.

“It’s very hard when you see that there is no space to move into. Meanwhile, every time we looked up at the clock time was running out.

Frustrated

“The way that they seemed to be playing with the clock frustrated us. 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.

“And, of course, we never imagined the slip and that was what truly made it hard for us. Nor did they. You can’t plan for a player to slip.” Guardian Service