• Premier League

Suarez unsure how Gerrard kept going after slip

Luis Suarez says he would have struggled to carry on playing had he, rather than Steven Gerrard, made the costly slip that led to Liverpool's crucial 2-0 defeat to Chelsea during last season's title run-in.

On Saturday, Chelsea return to Anfield for the first time since that match, with Liverpool so far failing to replicate the form that brought them so close to being crowned champions.

Steven Gerrard's costly slip allowed Demba Ba to put Chelsea ahead at Anfield © PA Photos

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In April, with Liverpool top of the Premier League table after 11 straight wins, Gerrard slipped to enable Demba Ba to run through and open the scoring in front of the Kop as Chelsea kept their own title hopes alive.

Liverpool's hopes of a first title since 1990 were effectively extinguished when they lost a 3-0 lead to draw 3-3 at Crystal Palace in a dramatic late collapse the following week.

"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," Suarez, who joined Barcelona for £75 million in the summer, wrote in his autobiography Crossing the Line.

"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."

Suarez believes Jose Mourinho's side would not have scored at all that day without Gerrard's mistake, criticising them for tactics which he said claimed saw them wasting time "from the very start".

"We knew that if they wanted to win the league - and people forget that they still had a chance to do that - they would have to play to win," he wrote.

"For them to try to waste time when the draw was no good to them was something that I didn't understand.

"There was nothing we could have done differently. We had 10 players in front of us, almost all of them in the penalty area.

"Mourinho knew: if you waste time, if you break it up from the very start, they're going to get frustrated, they're going to play a bit more crazily, they'll do anything. They pulled us out of our normal routine."

Suarez added that even Chelsea's players had been amazed by Mourinho's tactics that afternoon.

He said: "I even asked one of their players. 'What do you want me to do? If he makes us play like this, I have to play like this,' he replied. 'What else can I do? If I don't, I won't play. What would you do?'"

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