Suarez: Pool players acted like we had won the league - including me
Luis Suarez has admitted that Liverpool's players had entered their title-deciding match against Chelsea last season thinking that the English Premier League title was theirs.
With three games left to play, the Reds fell to a 2-0 defeat at Anfield before a 3-3 draw with Crystal Palace allowed Manchester City to overtake them to win the league.
Suarez, who has since moved to Barcelona, revealed in his autobiography Crossing The Line - serialised in The Guardian - that the club was in party mode ahead of the crucial fixture.
The Guardian reported that Suarez "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, and hearing other players openly talking about it".
The Uruguayan also wrote: "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."
Gerrard's slip
The stroke of luck that Suarez was referring to was Steven Gerrard's costly - and now infamous - slip that allowed Demba Ba to score the opener.
Suarez is unsure about how he would have been able to carry on playing if it were him making the mistake.
He mused: "If I had been in Stevie’s shoes, I don’t know if I would have been able to carry on playing. 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."
Source: The Guardian
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