Love him or hate him, you simply have to concede that it’s a joy to watch Luis Suarez play football.
He divides opinion due to the controversies he’s found himself embroiled in over the years but, with a ball at his feet, there’s nobody more entertaining.
Suarez possesses a voracious appetite for goals but he combines that selfish desire to get on the scoresheet with sublime technique and a finishing ability that one can tell has been honed over decades of rehearsal and repetition.
The forward is now one-third of the most potent attacking triumvirate in world football but, before moving to Barcelona, he was staking his claim for the honour of the greatest Liverpool striker of all time.
Suarez is beloved on the red half of Merseyside and it’s examples of his attitude like the below story from former teammate Jordan Henderson that go some way to explaining why he is such a fan favourite.
Speaking on LFCTV series ‘Premier League Heroes’, Henderson told a fantastic story about Suarez’s relentless desire to battle through the pain barrier so that he could get on the pitch.
“Knocks and niggles didn’t bother him, he played through them,” Henderson said. “[He was] a real warrior. I never saw him in the treatment room.
“I remember one game, his ankle was that swollen he couldn’t get his boot on, so he had to go a size up in someone else’s boots. He played on and scored an unbelievable free-kick.
“Stuff like that you don’t forget. What he does on the pitch speaks for itself. To line up in the tunnel, it’d give you so much confidence as a player knowing that you were going into a game and he was leading at the top. You would react from him and he would set everything off.”
Suarez scored 82 goals in 133 games for the Reds before moving to La Liga in 2014 for a fee of £65 million.
And while he is currently tearing it up in Catalonia, Suarez’s contribution to the Liverpool cause for three and a half years quickly turned him into a cult hero at Anfield.
“He could make the difference at any point,” Henderson added. “You could be backs against the wall and defending for your life, and Luis could come up with a bit of magic and get you a goal – that’s the quality he had.
“I think the biggest thing was just the confidence he gave the whole group. When you line up alongside him and you’re on the pitch, you know no matter what happens in the game he could produce anything for you. That gave us confidence as players.
“I learned a lot from Luis as a player and as a person.”
