da bet nacional： Anyone staying up to watch the Copa America over the last few nights will have seen the kind of passionate football they expected to see from a competition that’s been anything but dull.
da mrbet： But there’s just one small regret – the fact that we haven’t seen the best of some of the stars. Specifically Neymar of course who is currently banned for the remainder of the tournament, and Luis Suarez who was banned for all of it thanks to his international ban for biting Giorgio Chiellini lasting longer than his domestic ban.
And so we haven’t seen Suarez at all, and his team are now out at the quarter final stage. They only just scraped through the group as one of the two best third placed teams and that was what set up their quarter final against hosts Chile.
True, Edinson Cavani was sent off while the score was 0-0 in that Chile game, and he was sent off in shocking, even appalling circumstances. To just brush the face of someone who has literally sexually assaulted you in the workplace certainly does not merit a red card. And the game could have been different.
No doubt, though, that Uruguay were at fault themselves from their early exit. They made it much harder for themselves by doing so poorly in the group. Not having Suarez was surely a factor.
Take their World Cup campaign last year. Suarez played in two matches – where Uruguay beat England and Italy to go through, but lost to Costa Rica when Suarez was still injured, and then lost to James Rodriguez’s Colombia when Suarez was banned.
It’s always hard to say that one player would have made such a big difference, but in Suarez’s case, it’s not just two games where he was missed. Last season at Liverpool he was sorely missed indeed. Liverpool struggled to replace him and had an awful start to the season and a dismal end that saw them play catch-up to the Champions League chasing teams before imploding when it really mattered. Then again, you could say the same thing about the season before when Liverpool really should have won the title, and they wouldn’t have been begrudged it because they were sensational. They were sensational in large part due to Suarez, but even with him they still failed.
Still, the difference between second and fifth in the Premier League isn’t measurable simply by league positions. It’s almost immeasurable to club finances and prestige. To be the the Champions League is to make a pilgrimage to Football’s holy land, and riches follow. To play in the Europa League however it to potter around in footballing purgatory, being forced to haul your strife and sorrow to Eastern Europe every Thursday night before playing again on Sunday.
Had Suarez been in Liverpool’s team this season would they have won the league? Perhaps, but probably not. Mourinho’s Chelsea were that good. Would barcelona have won the Champions League? That’s another hard one. If you take Messi or Neymar out of that team then they might have had bigger problems. Then again, Barcelona didn’t look like they’d be winning a treble before Suarez joined the attack and there were calls for Luis Enrique’s head before Christmas. But what do they know?
It’s so difficult to measure one player’s impact on the game, but when literally every team he plays for improves so much when he’s playing and declines so far when he doesn’t play you have to take that as a sign. Suarez is surely one of the most important players in the world – he’s one of the best players in the world.
It’s such a shame for his teams that he’s suspended so often!
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