Luis Suarez had a nice line in gentle mischief, many a true word said in jest and with a little bit of edge.
Delivered with the Galician accent he never lost over 60 years living within a short stroll of Milan’s San Siro, that fit somehow. An understated dignity, a kind of reserved irony, supposedly defines people from the wet northwest of Spain which faces the Atlantic, a place apart, and he had a capacity to quietly cut through the rubbish. Every now and again, it came as a reminder. Often a necessary one, and not least of how good he was.
And Suarez, who died July 9 aged 88, was good. The best, in fact. Even if that, it sometimes felt, was forgotten. Sometimes it felt that way to him, too. Asked one day a decade or so ago what kind of player he was — back when that Barcelona team was, well, that Barcelona team — the name of Xavi Hernandez came up. The world’s best midfielder, the ideologue of the best team in the world at the time and perhaps even of any time, it was quite the comparison. Maybe, Suarez suggested. And then he added deadpan, having applied the perfect pause: “Only, I could shoot. And pass a ball 40 yards.” You could almost hear the glint in his eye, the hint of a smile. The flash of pride, too.
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He scored a lot of goals, it was true — 141 in 253 games at Barcelona — but that wasn’t what defined him. There was a finesse about him, timing and vision. In his early days at Barcelona he had been moved to tell Ferenc Plattko, his manager, that he had come to play football, not be a boxer. This week, after his passing, one paper in Italy, where he is an icon, referred to him as “part dancer, part bullfighter.” And Alfredo Di Stefano, who knew a thing or two about football and always wanted him at his side at Real Madrid, called him the architect.
In 1960, Suarez won the Ballon d’Or. Sixty-seven years on, he remains the only man born in Spain ever to have won it. Including Xavi or Andres Iniesta, who Suarez himself thought should have won it in 2010. Just a list of the men he finished ahead of tells you how special he was. Ferenc Puskas, Lev Yashin, and Bobby Charlton among them; Raymond Kopa, Uwe Seeler, John Charles and Di Stefano, too. He was handed the trophy before a game at the Camp Nou. He stood, briefly thanked them for their applause and handed it back to the physio to look after, no ceremony, no shouting.
