Excerpt from Suarez's biography, on facing Agger, Skrtel, Carra & Flanagan in training:
The football there (England) is strong, hard, quick. It was good for that to happen to me at the very start because it meant that there was no doubt in my mind about what was required. That first touch was the first lesson.
I could see it in training too. In the first few sessions, I was wary of Martin Skrtel and Danny Agger because they are very aggressive defenders. Martin can be particularly brutal. Even a couple of seasons later, if he ever wandered over to my side of the pitch then I would wander off to the other side to get away from him. And the same with Danny. I told them both in the first few sessions: ‘Don’t worry: I take it easy in training, so you take it easy’. Then I nutmegged one of them without really meaning to and so the gloves came off.
‘I thought you were taking it easy? Okay, now we’re playing for real’ I don’t think they ever believed me after that. But our training battles were always in good spirits, as team-mates. The only team-mate it ever got heated with was Jamie Carragher. I think he was frustrated about not playing much and the fact that he was coming towards the end of his career, so there would be a few lively moments but we would always shake hands at the end of the session.
We never fell out on or off the pitch, but I did have to get used to how he was in training. I never train with shin pads and I would say to myself: ‘How can a team-mate make a challenge like that in training that could easily have injured me?’ Some of the other players said it to me: ‘That’s how Carra is, so make sure you’re always on the move or he’ll hit you hard’. I’d expected it from Martin and Danny, but I didn’t know Carra so well so I had to learn fast. I’m aggressive in training as well. But not to the point of injuring a team-mate. I appreciate that it’s more difficult for a defender – they have to go in hard to show the manager that they should be in the team and it’s not always easy to strike that balance.
As they said, that’s how Carra was. He was more of a shouter, a complainer, than Stevie Gerrard. He always demanded more: he was the typical tough, aggressive defender. He played the games with an intensity that I don’t think I have ever seen from another defender – he lived the game.
I loved his commitment. Sometimes he flew in and I thought, ‘How could you make a tackle like that?’ But I’m not sure if he would have achieved so much, or gone so far, if he had not had that character. That’s what drove him on and made him a better player. It was all about personality.
I wouldn’t say that during the final season I missed him as such. We never really had a very close relationship; we were team-mates rather than friends. But I did miss the way he spoke, the way he lead, and I admired him. Every time he spoke, I listened.
He was closer to Stevie and the staff at the club than some of his team-mates. He had been there for so long, given this club so much, while other players came and went. Clubs need players like that: people who have been there all their lives, who know the club inside out, who get it and can lead others. They’re the ones who keep the identity going. People like Jamie Carragher are the club.
I think Liverpool have a new Jamie Carragher too, and that’s Jon Flanagan. He’s very, very similar. He has the same personality, he’s aggressive on the pitch. He may be limited in technical terms, but he knows that and plays to his strengths. When Carra played as a full-back, if he went up the line he knew what he had to do and what not to do. Flanagan is the same. He knows. He has the spirit and hunger that Carra had, the same ambition to squeeze every last drop of talent out of himself. He’s going to go a very long way. Players like that will always go a very long way. People may say, ‘he hasn’t got this, he hasn’t got that’, but a player like him will succeed. He’s not easy to face in training either.