Retired Indian cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu once said, “Statistics are like miniskirts — they reveal more than what they hide.”
Well, here’s a statistic for soccer fans: 68 goals in 90 games.
That was the strike rate for Barcelona forwards Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez, who will make his debut against Real Madrid on Saturday, during the 2013-14 league season.
It is a statistic that rekindles memories of the 72-goal trident of Messi, Samuel Eto’o and Thierry Henry five years ago, when the three forwards led Barcelona to the first treble in Spanish soccer history; La Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League victories that crowned Messi as the world’s greatest and earned manager Pep Guardiola acclaim for the invention of tiki-taka.
With Messi and Neymar again scoring at will this season (15 goals in 15 league games combined), closer attention than usual will be paid to this weekend’s clásico, a fixture that with it’s historical, political, cultural and financial significance requires little in the way of extra promotion.
Against a Real Madrid team that has plundered opponents for 30 goals in eight games, with it’s own top-rate strike force of Cristiano Ronaldo, World Cup Golden Boot winner James Rodriguez and Karim Benzema, Suarez will play his first competitive match since taking a bite out of Giorgio Chiellini’s shoulder in Brazil this summer.
The Uruguayan could have asked for no grander entry, as the eyes of the entire football world look on to see whether he can justify the $121 million his new club spent to purchase him from Liverpool, knowing he would miss the opening two months of the season as a result of a FIFA suspension for his third-career biting incident.
Like Messi and Neymar, Suarez is an iconic figure in his country. The 27-year-old has not collected an unprecedented four World Player of the Year awards like Messi, or won his club a first continental title in over fifty years like Neymar (Santos, Copa Libertadores 2011), but his never-say-die attitude has immortalized him as Uruguay’s golden child. So much so that even as the best moment of his career, scoring four goals as his country won the 2011 Copa America, is overshadowed by the racial abuse of opponents, the admitted conning of referees and the on-field violence, few in the streets of Montevideo find a bad word to say about Suarez.
Barcelona fans may not be as forgiving. Ronaldinho and Henry, two of the previous generation’s greatest players, were moved on when their goals and assist slowly dried up. And, even if Suarez gets the ball in the back of the net with the regularity that he did at Liverpool over the past three seasons, it is not likely that his incidences of insanity will be tolerated by a club that has chosen the mild-mannered and almost embarrassingly well-behaved Messi as the face of their franchise.
The legacy Suarez leaves at Barcelona will begin to be written tomorrow against the club’s eternal rivals, and manager Luis Enrique has already hinted that he may start all three South Americans alongside one another. As with every other moment of Suarez’s career, it is impossible to predict what will happen.
A Peach of a GOAL! 