
At May’s Football Writers’ Association dinner held in honour of 2014 winner Luis Suarez, Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers told an audience that he had been privileged to work with the Uruguayan and spoke of the lengths the player had reached to improve his behaviour.
What we know now, as many of us suspected back then, was that Suarez had merely been fooling us all along. Inside this gifted footballer’s head is a brain that simply cannot be rewired.
Towards the end of this awful game in the stifling heat of Natal on Tuesday afternoon, I had found my mind wandering to the next steps in this competition. Thoughts of Thursday’s Germany-USA game and Saturday’s knockout tie between Brazil and Chile had begun to occupy me.












