Regarded by many as one of the most talented players in world football, Luis Suárez’s skill and goal-scoring ability have often been overshadowed by moments of sheer lunacy.
Having taken his previous club Liverpool to the brink of a Premiership title last season, the first in almost a quarter of a century for the red half of Merseyside, it was his biting of Italian defender Georgio Chiellini in last year’s World Cup finals in Brazil, the third biting incident in his career, that could possibly have been the last straw for the club’s ownership.
A subsequent four-month ban from all football-related activities followed and ultimately his sale to current club Barcelona.
If you are mildly interested in reading Suárez’s thoughts and reasoning behind his many moments of self-destruction, you won’t find them in Crossing the Line.
For the most part, the book steers clear of the major controversies and instead focuses on Suárez’s determination and his win-at-all-costs mentality. This is a love story, as the title of the first chapter puts it, with his wife Sofia (Sofi) featuring prominently as the major influence on him becoming the footballer he is today.
Suárez was 15 when he met 13-year-old Sofi from a well-to-do family who lived in Solymar 20km away, a distance he would travel every night after practice, spending his entire player allowance on the bus fares to get there.
Growing up in an impoverished family in Uruguay, Luis arranged unofficial match bonuses with his club’s directors, Wilson Perez and Jose Luis Esposito to earn himself the 20 pesos it took to get him to Solymar, only worrying about how he’d get home when the time came to leave. He often resorted to hitch-hiking in the early hours of the morning.
Then Sofi and her family emigrated to Barcelona, Spain, and so began his relentless quest to be reunited with her.
Money earned was no longer spent on bus fares, but on long distance phone calls.
He realised that the only way he would achieve his goal of being with her was to excel in his footballing career.
Longer practice sessions and a will to do well for his home town club, Nacional, would later be rewarded by a scout from the Dutch side Groningen, taking a keen interest in him. Suárez had never heard of Groningen when he put pen to paper on his first senior contract, but he knew that Holland was much closer to Spain than Uruguay and therefore one step closer to Sofi.
Even though one gets a clearer picture as to what motivates him to do better in each game and at each stage of his career, the book still leaves you asking questions about why he would need to sink his teeth into opposition players.
Suárez touches on the Chiellini bite in the opening pages of the introduction, but rationalises it as a heat of the moment reaction.
“The hand of Suárez” incident during the South Africa 2010 World Cup, which denied Ghana a semi-final place, is played up as a tale of heroic patriotism, an act of selflessness and done out of love for his country Uruguay, rather than what most consider it to be – an act of cheating.
If you consider Luis Suárez a blight on the football landscape, his book will do very little to convince you otherwise.
* Luis Suárez: Crossing the Line – My Story is published by Headline Books