Suarez – 2016 Updated Edition E-Book

Luca Caioli

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Serie: Luca Caioli
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 338

Beschreibung

Luis Suárez is one of the most brilliant and controversial players in world football. Signed by Barcelona in 2014 despite a lengthy ban for biting an opponent, he quickly became a central figure in their sensational treble-winning campaign, setting the seal on it with the decisive goal in the Champions League final. However, a history of violent on-pitch incidents has left supporters wondering whether the maverick centre forward can ever completely conquer his demons. This updated biography, featuring exclusive interviews with those who have known and worked with him, offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the life and career of one of football's most enigmatic stars.

Leseprobe

SUÁREZ

About the author

Luca Caioli is the bestselling author of Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar. A renowned Italian sports journalist, he lives in Spain.

SUÁREZ

THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY BEHIND FOOTBALL’S MOST EXPLOSIVE TALENT

Updated Edition

LUCA CAIOLI

This updated edition first published in the UK in 2015 by Icon Books Ltd

Previously published in the UK and USA in 2014 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

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ISBN: 978-190685-097-5

Text copyright © 2014, 2015 Luca Caioli

Translation of chapters 1–22 copyright © 2014 Charlie Wright

Translation of chapter 23 copyright © 2015 Sheli Rodney

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in New Baskerville by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Contents

1A powerful identity

2Thermal baths, oranges and baby football

3The long walk south

4A lot of heart

5A marvellous surprise

A conversation with Rubén Sosa

6A love story

7Time bomb

8No limits

A conversation with Martín Lasarte

9In the city of the north

10Red and white

11Hand of the devil

12Come on, you light blues

A conversation with Jaime Roos

13Bite and run

14The best

15‘Negro’

16A cannibal at Anfield

17Rationality and irrationality

A conversation with Gerardo Caetano

18News from the year of resurrection

19The stairs

A conversation with Óscar Washington Tabárez

20The saint and the delinquent

21Repentance

22New life

23Zero to hero

A career in numbers

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

A powerful identity

José Mujica is not a great lover of football. As a kid, as with all kids, he played football but at twelve he started to cycle and for three or four seasons, he dedicated all his time to cycling. He supports Atlético Cerro because it is the team where he lives and because when he was younger, Huracán del Paso de la Arena did not exist.

He is not a great lover of the ‘sphere’ but he knows that in Latin America, ‘the greatest form of communication is football which, together with language, is the strongest bond and relationship which can exist between societies in South America. A simple game has become something of the utmost seriousness and importance.’ A game which sometimes leads to violence in the stadiums: ‘the beast within us which threatens the heart of all societies’. Leaving violence to one side, Mujica is convinced that ‘Uruguay is one of the most football obsessed countries in the world.’ In a recent radio interview, he commented: ‘Relative to the size of the country and the potential of each citizen [there are 3.3 million people in Uruguay], Uruguayan football is a miracle created by the passion of our people.’

The nation’s former President, who from 2010 to 2015 surprised the world with his laws (legalisation of marijuana, abortion and gay marriage) and his recipe for human happiness (as reported on by The Economist which awarded the country Country of the Year 2013), is right. He is not the only one to think like this. The footballing miracle is the topic of conversation in all circles of society: facts, numbers and statistics are trotted out to prove this by anyone you ask. The four stars on the light blue shirt of the national team remind the populace of the two Olympic golds (1924 and 1928) and the two World Cups (1930 and 1950); there were also fifteen Copa Americas. The generalised practice and routine of football: from the dusty side streets to the lush green pitches of the professional teams, from the streets to ‘baby football’ (every weekend Montevideo sees around 3,000 matches of baby football being played, a real social event for the families and the kids aged between five and twelve.) The national championship, across the first and second divisions, has 34 clubs, 29 of which are in the capital. The tickets to go and watch the matches are reasonable: 80 to 500 pesos (€2.50–15). This allows anyone who wants to go and watch a game. All of these matches are viewed for peanuts compared to the European figures: US$10 million for the TV rights in Uruguay compared to €1,229 million for the Premier League; US$15 million is the budget for Club Nacional against €520 million for Real Madrid. Pepe Mujica commented: ‘[This last figure] is probably an amount which Uruguayan football has not spent in its entire history’. And yet notwithstanding the money and the numbers, the footballing miracle continues and the tiny South American country fights its corner amidst the giants of Brazil and Argentina. It can boast a whole host of magical players as though it were a nation of 60 or 200 million inhabitants. Why? Because football is a passion (or illness) which runs through the veins of society at all levels. Because it is a country with weak national identity, where nationalism is not valued strongly and where national pride is placed in the light blue shirt and in antiporteñismo (anti-Argentine sentiment). Football is a powerful identity: a substantial and fundamental part of the culture of the nation. And it is getting even more powerful as it defines the role that sport and football plays in the value system of the nation. There is a real symbiosis between football and the country. Uruguay stops for two events and two events only: a national match and the general elections. Politics and football are central to life in the Eastern Republic of Uruguay. So much so that the list of Uruguayan heroes is peppered with footballers like Obdulio Varela, ‘El Negro Jefe’, who played in the 1950 World Cup and José Nasazzi, ‘El Mariscal’, who played in the 1930 World Cup. Football is the place where conflicts are played out, where great discourse is made and the source of the expressions which infiltrate the language: ‘Los de afuera son de palo’ (‘Outsiders don’t play’). This was the phrase which Varela famously said to boost his team’s morale before entering Maracanã packed with 200,000 fans. It is a phrase used to indicate that those who are outside the family, the group or the party do not count. It is better not to listen to the outsiders.

How this world was built, this powerful identity, has to do with the history of the Eastern Republic of Uruguay, even though it is hard to work out even today.

Football everywhere, as in Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Germany and France, is connected to the industrial revolution and the expansion of the English economy. It was Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s subjects who spread sport to every corner of the globe. Football arrived at the port of Montevideo in the luggage of the sailors, craftsmen, professors, workers, bank managers, railway personnel and gas company workers. At the end of the nineteenth century it came and got a foothold at the cricket clubs like Montevideo Cricket Club, founded in 1861.

The members of the club played not only in their whites and with their bats made of cork and leather but started to play rugby and football against teams from the merchant ships and the Royal Navy. One such match took place in 1878 along the coast near Carretas Point.

But the records show that it was only in 1881, on 22 June, that the first official match between two clubs from Montevideo took place. The match was played in the La Blanqueada quarter on a pitch which the English called the English Ground. The Montevideo Cricket Club against the Montevideo Rowing Club. The final score was 1-0 to the cricketers. Seven days later the rematch: the Cricket Club won again, 2-1. It was the Montevideo Cricket Club which hosted the first international match, on 15 August 1889, against the Argentinians of Buenos Aires Cricket Club. The locals watched the new pastime of the crazy English with detached bemusement but bit by bit the younger members of well-to-do society in Montevideo started to get hooked.

From behind his desk in his office just a stone’s throw from the stadium’s Amsterdam stands, Mario Romano, manager of the Centenary Stadium of Montevideo, explained: ‘In May of 1891, Enrique Cándido Litchenberger sent an invite to his schoolmates at the English High School to set up a Uruguayan football club. On 1 June 1891, it was done. The Football Association was set up and played its first match in August against the Montevideo Cricket Club. In September, the club changed its name to Albion Football Club in honour of the birthplace of football.’

It is clear to see that England was the inspiration for many clubs in the Eastern Republic, as for example the footballers of the College of Capuchin Monks. In 1915, they were looking for a name for their club and they took inspiration from the map of the United Kingdom. They remembered the explanations of their teacher in class: the students were taught that huge transatlantic cargo ships left from the port of Liverpool headed for Montevideo. After hearing this, they were in no doubt and decided to call their club ‘Liverpool’. The team still plays today in the second division. It is also worth considering the origins and diatribe of Uruguayan football which even today have not been agreed upon. It lies somewhere in the history of Nacional and Peñarol, the rivalry between the most important clubs in the country; the teams have won 93 of the 110 titles between them, plus eight Libertadores Cups and six Intercontinental Cups. On 14 May 1889, Club Nacional de Football was born from the merger of two university clubs (Montevideo Football Club and Uruguay Athletic Club de La Unión). Club Nacional de Football, the answer to the colonial teams. This is the reason the strip of the club is white, light blue and red, the same as the flag of José Gervasio Artigas, the father of the Uruguayan nationhood.

On 28 September 1891, in the north-eastern part of Montevideo, a group of mainly English workers from the Central Uruguay Railway Company of Montevideo Limited, formed the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club, known as CURCC or, for short, Peñarol (a name which comes from the area in the north-east of the city where the railway companies’ building yards were). Their colours were yellow and black like the railway signals. It was here that CURCC started to make its mark on the Uruguayan championship. In 1900, CURCC met three other teams, Albion, Deutscher and Uruguay Athletic in the Uruguayan championship. On 13 December 1913, CURCC officially renamed itself Peñarol. CURCC had played at least 50 matches against Nacional: Carboneros (colliers) vs Bolsos (pockets, as they used to play with a jersey that had a pocket on the chest), Peñarol vs Nacional; on the one side the English railway club, on the other the university elite; on the one hand the gringos, on the other the nationalistic elite. It was this rivalry that formed the backdrop to football in the salad days of the Eastern Republic. It was there that the passion for this beautiful game started to fill the veins of the nation. The sport spread like wildfire engulfing a generation of young men as it went. Other teams sprouted: Wanderers, River Plate, Bristol, Central, Universal, Colon, Reformers, Dublin …

Matches were played against English teams such as Southampton, Nottingham Forest and Tottenham who were on tour in South America. The eternal rivalry between Argentina and Uruguay got under way in the Lipton Cup and Newton Cup.

Football was a social leveller. It was a place where the poor and rich could integrate and mix; immigrants mixed with the well-to-do. Between 1860 and 1920, Uruguay saw a mass influx of immigrants from Europe – Spain and Italy mainly – which changed the demographics of the country for ever. This European immigration was matched by the influx of African Brazilians, slaves in some cases, coming from nearby Brazil. The mixed-race population was key to the composition of Uruguayan society. In a country without serious inter-class tensions and where there aren’t deep-rooted aristocratic tendencies, immigrants, Africans and Hispanics are muddled together.

Lincoln Maiztegui Casas, history professor and author of epic political and social studies in Uruguay which cover the very beginnings of socio-political trends in Uruguay, explained the demographics as follows: ‘At the start of the 1900s, Uruguay was not an egalitarian society but it was integrated thanks to the experience of a social state and the education system reform in 1877 promoted by José Pedro Varela. School was non-religious, free and mandatory. The idea that a rich person’s son and a poor person’s son could go to the same school, use the same pinafore and same bow was born. It was a reform which created a surge for equality in society and slowly eroded the cultural differences between the indigenous population and the immigrants. The immigrants did not lose touch with their cultural roots but deep in their soul they feel Uruguayan.’

Football played the same role in helping to bring people from different cultures and classes together. You only need to take a look at the names of the national team which won the Paris Olympics in 1924, i.e. Petrone, Scarone, Romano, Nasazzi, Iriarte and Urdinaran, and you realise that the majority of the names are Italian and Spanish in origin. There was José Leandro Andrade, the ‘Black Marvel’, the first great black football player in the history of Uruguayan football. There is no question that football integrates and brings together. It is also a way to climb the social ladder. A great example of this was that of Abdón Porte El Indio. Maiztegui, being a great professor and orator and devout Bolso, told the story while sitting at his kitchen table behind a big pile of books:

‘He had won the championship with Nacional and he had won the Copa America in 1917 with Uruguay but the fateful day came when the coach told him that on Sunday he would not be in the starting line-up. Abdón could not live without playing football for Nacional. Football had taught him to live in society, to dress properly, to have a bath, to get a job, and to get a girlfriend. Thus it was that on 5 March 1918, in the Gran Parque Central, the Nacional stadium, he shot himself in the head. They found him the next day with the gun still in his hand.’

This was in the 1920s, the years of success for Uruguayan football.

Mario Romano explained as he ambled through the halls to the Football Museum at the heart of the Centenary Stadium: ‘There was no particular reason behind the Uruguayan success at the start of the twentieth century.’

The manager pointed out the shirts, balls, trophies, the boots of José Vidal, number 5 for the national team of 1924 and the large photo of Andrade. He stopped to explain and provide some detail about the national trophies. Then he picked up from where he had stopped a few moments before: ‘I believe it has a lot to do with the Rio de la Plata situation, with the economic power of Uruguay and Argentina, economic powerhouses at that time. They had not suffered the fallout of the First World War which had ravaged Europe. On the contrary, they saw a net increase in exports, capital investment and currency exchange. Uruguay was going through a period of growth, commercial and industrial expansion; it had a stable political regime with the state providing an advanced social welfare system and policies were in place to promote physical education which opened up the sports fields to the whole country. It was [Uruguay’s] football in particular which made its mark on the Old Continent. Football had come to conquer the world and conquer it did. In Paris in 1924, Uruguay won the Olympic tournament beating Switzerland 3-0 and amazing the fans.’

Henri de Montherlant, a French novelist and playwright, wrote: ‘A revelation! This is true football. The one we knew, which we played, compared to this it is just a school pastime.’

Maiztegui added: ‘Uruguay was a small country which did not stand out on the world map; it made a name for itself in Europe not for its literary culture inspired by the French, not for its musical culture with strong Italian influences but for its footballers.’

It was in Paris at the Colombes stadium that the legend of garra charrúa (Charruan tenacity) started to embed itself in the public consciousness. The organisers did not know how to identify the players from Uruguay and so requested that a Frenchman dressed in traditional Uruguayan clothing stood in front of the Uruguayan cohort. The Uruguayan players were shocked. Their parents and grandparents came from Europe and the players did not know anything about the Indios and Aborigines who had lived in the East Strip. The last Indios, the indigenous people of Uruguay, were killed in 1831 in the matanza de Salsipuedes (the massacre of Salsipuedes) by Jose Fructuoso Rivera y Toscana, the first Constitutional President of Uruguay. Those that survived and were imprisoned ended up being turned into slaves in Montevideo or sent to Paris and exhibited like a circus attraction. Thanks to romantic poets like Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, the legend of the brave and fearless warrior who fought to the death against any enemy in his way lives on. Garra charrúa was a divine gift that enabled a warrior to give that little bit extra when the enemy least expected it.

This battle quality was transposed on to the game of football and the Uruguayan ‘warriors’ of football. It became the benchmark for the national team.

At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, Uruguay won a second gold medal, beating their eternal rivals Argentina in the final by drawing the first leg and winning the second. At the 1929 congress in Barcelona, FIFA decided to award the organisation of the first World Cup to Uruguay: a rich country which had not suffered the 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. It was experiencing what came to be known as los años locos (‘the crazy years’). The economy was booming. The peso was worth more than the dollar. Social mobility was on the up and the middle class saw its purchasing power improve significantly. Great warehouses opened up to manage the increase in demand for consumer goods; 15,000 cars were imported in one year alone. Montevideo was transformed: new residential areas sprang up, skyscrapers reached for the sky, hospitals, schools, universities, parks and stadiums (including the Centenary stadium) burst into life.

FIFA, which knows and has always known where the real money is, chose Uruguay because it understood that its economy could take on the cost of organising a World Cup. The Uruguayan government went even further than it was asked to: it set aside 300,000 pesos to pay for the transatlantic liners to ferry the players from the other teams from Europe to Uruguay. Accommodation was all included and a daily allowance was granted to the players and staff of France, Yugoslavia, Belgium and Romania (the only four countries from the Old Continent). In six months, the El Centenario stadium was built. Shift workers worked non-stop to make sure it was ready on time. It is the only stadium to have been declared a FIFA Monument to Football. The stats are impressive: capacity of 90,000; cost of 1.5 million pesos. It was designed by the architect, Juan Antonio Scasso.

The torrential rains put a hold on the opening ceremony and the stadium was opened five days after the World Cup had started. It was at 2.10pm on Saturday, 30 July 1930 that the final took place: Uruguay vs Argentina. It was a replay of what had happened two years prior in Amsterdam. Héctor Castro, the divine ‘El Manco’ (‘one-armed’), the son of Galician immigrants – a forward who had only one hand as the other had been sawn off by an electric saw when he was a kid – he scored in the 89th minute with a superb header that took the final score to 4-2. Uruguay were champions of the world.

FIFA President Jules Rimet presented Uruguay’s captain José Nasazzi, ‘The Terrible’, with the World Cup trophy. The country was in a state of euphoria. The government made 31 July a national holiday. The Light Blues had won ‘thanks to a brilliant combination of direct and aggressive football consisting of long balls (emulating the English style) and elaborate short passes to mix the rhythm of the game up’, according to sociologist, Rafael Bayce, in his book, The Evolution of the Systems of Play. The final in the Centenary stadium was the keystone to establishing football as a mainstream sport in the Rio de la Plata.

*

It was at 4.33pm on 16 July 1950 in Rio de Janeiro that Alcides Ghiggia, the left-winger for Uruguay, silenced the Maracanã (long before Frank Sinatra and Pope Wojtyla would do the same). Two hundred thousand people who had been convinced they were going to win fell silent. Uruguay beat Brazil and took home their second World Cup. It was the worst match played at the Maracanã, the worst tragedy from Brazil’s perspective. Mario Filho wrote in his editorial in the Jornal dos Sports: ‘The city has closed its windows and gone into mourning. It was as though every Brazilian had lost his or her loved one. Or, even worse, as though every Brazilian had lost their honour and dignity.’ It was a shock to the system, a ‘psychological Hiroshima’ as coined by the playwright, Nelson Rodríguez; an infinite sadness which led to tears, heart attacks and suicides.

Uruguay, on the other hand, was in party mode. Obdulio Varela, the Uruguayan captain, took time to soothe Brazilian spirits: he spent the night drinking and crying with the losers and later stated: ‘con la Celeste en el pecto somos dobles hombres’ (with Uruguay in our hearts we are at least twice the men we normally are). The man became a legend, a symbol for victory and the garra charrúa.

Sixty-five years have gone by since that fateful match, but Uruguay is still talking about it. Books are written about it, films are made about those glorious 90 minutes. No one has forgotten the Maracanazo. It is used as a reference point, with mixed results. Mario Romano interpreted that World Cup from a purely sporting event perspective: ‘Maracanã was a landmark in the footballing history of Uruguay; it was its greatest achievement. It proved to everyone the garra charrúa, the impossible could be possible and that you should never give up; it was David vs Goliath. The flip side was that only the number one spot was acceptable. When the national team came fourth in the World Cup in Switzerland, it was treated as a failure, just like the fourth place in the 1970 World Cup. It was only 60 years later that fourth place in the South African World Cup was celebrated as it should be, with vigour and joy.’

Maiztegui added: ‘The problem is not in the sporting event – which is a fact – but in how it is interpreted. Or rather: we, Uruguayans, are winners whom others study, work and prepare, train and push hard but we, with our garra charrúa, will always beat them. Juan Alberto Schiaffino, a graceful player, a great follower of football confessed to me: “Will they never say or write that we beat Brazil because we played great football? Will they continue to say that it was the garra tenacity and the fact that we are cunning and macho? An idea that has done more damage than floods, for football and for our country.”‘

Pepe Mujica said that after the victory, Uruguayans went to sleep and in the decade that followed the decline of a once-rich nation ensued.

Maiztegui stated: ‘In 1950 Europe had other things to think about than football and slowly rebuilt its industries, social fabric and workforce to gain its place on the international stage, whereas Uruguay and for the most part all of Latin America did not work out how to make the most of the favourable economic conditions and to industrialise their economies; Uruguay started to fall behind just as it did on the pitch.’

Those who rest on their laurels get bogged down and reliant on the ideas and concepts of the past, including ideas about physical fitness, tactics and strategy. A team which is stuck in a rut does not take on new ideas and concepts; it fails to evolve. From the middle of the 1950s, the influx of migrants, which for several decades had seen thousands of immigrants come to Uruguay, was reversed and among the exodus of people were the footballers. Maiztegui added: ‘Examples are Schiaffino and Ghiggia who ended up at Milan and Rome in Italy; there was José Santamaria who, after the Swiss World Cup, moved to Real Madrid and in the 1980s trained with the Spanish team. Even in our darkest hour, we have exported meat and players.’

The darkest days in the history of Uruguay started on 27 June 1973 when President Juan María Bordaberry dissolved Parliament and with the support of the army set up a civic-military dictatorship which lasted until 1985. It was a dictatorship that removed all opponents, imprisoned leftist managers and trade unionists and tortured leaders such as Mujica, who was arrested for taking part in the Tupamaros Liberation Movement. He was in prison for thirteen years. Even the traditional party followers were imprisoned. Bordaberry revoked all civil liberties and rights. Maiztegui, who was forced to leave for Spain during the years of the regime, explained: ‘It was a regime that made all the structural problems of the country even worse. It buried the hatchet on the country. It is only now that we are beginning to get back what we lost in that period; 50 years of being economically static and the financial crises of 2001 and 2002.’

2005 was a turning point: Frente Amplio won the elections. He won with a coalition of leftist groups. The 2009 election of President José Mujica was also a step in the right direction. There is a different feeling in the air in Uruguay: unemployment has been reduced from 40 per cent to 6.5 per cent in nine years. The middle class have got their purchasing power back. Social policies are changing the face of the country. There is still a lot to do in terms of education and health but whilst Uruguay used to be a place to get away from, now it is a place to go to. Hope has been restored and football has benefited from this. The national side came fourth in the 2011 Copa America held in Argentina. Romano explained it as follows:

‘History has repeated itself once again; external conditions have affected the world of football, even if there are still structural problems. Apart from Peñarol and Nacional, the championship has few international-level teams and the quality of the teams is not great. For these reasons, international TV companies do not follow our football. In 2006, Uruguay began a coherent training programme which led to the Under-17s and Under-20s getting to the final of the World Cup for the relevant category. However, Uruguay does not have the sponsorship and budget that other Latin American teams have, such as Brazil and Argentina, and nowhere near those of Italy and England. The biggest difference between Uruguayan football and football in the rest of the world is structural: there are simply too few structures in place to develop and train youngsters and there are no policies to change this. And yet, incredibly, what with the number of young aspiring players and a diet rich in meat and dairy, we continue to produce strong players who can easily adapt to any championship. Footballers like Luis Suárez are a reason to be proud to be Uruguayan.’

Chapter 2

Thermal baths, oranges and baby football

Ms Gladys was 85 years old but she did not look it. Wearing a light blue cardigan, necklace with matching earrings, and owlish glasses, she strolled out of a store with some shopping. She crossed the road and politely welcomed in the visitors. She opened the gate to her house and a fluffy black cat perched on the garden wall like a garden gnome, keeping a watchful eye on the world passing by. Through a long corridor and into the kitchen, full of memories. Gladys talked about her life: two husbands who died too young, children she never had; and she talked about her neighbours, the Suárez Diaz family. ‘They lived just next door’, Gladys explained. ‘Yes, just over there.’ It was a prefabricated house with a corrugated iron roof and brown walls with a green patch out front on the crossroads between Calle 6 de abril and Grito de Ascencio. Gladys’s memory was spot on. She recalled Luis Suárez well: ‘He played football in front of his house with his brothers. He never stopped for a minute. I saw him come and go on his way to school no. 64 in Salto.’

Salto is in the north-east of Uruguay, 498 kilometres from the capital. It is six hours by bus from the Tres Cruces terminal in Montevideo; 20 minutes from Concordia Entre Rios in Argentina. There are 104,000 inhabitants according to the latest census. It is the city with the second highest population in the Eastern Republic of Uruguay, after Montevideo. Salto, capital of the homonymous Province, takes its name from two waterfalls in the area, Salto Grande and Salto Chico. It is famous for the wonderful aroma of the juicy oranges which grow there. They are the best in the whole of South America, according to locals. It is also known for the thermal baths of Arapey and Damyán. It is not by chance that the first question asked of visitors when they arrive in Salto is ‘Have you been to the thermal baths?’ You cannot miss them. They rejuvenate you and you feel like a new person.

Arapey and Damyán are thermal baths with waters which have medicinal and healing properties to revitalise visitors and treat any aches and pains. The thermal waters were discovered by workers drilling for oil in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, during holy week, known to lay people as ‘tourist week’, adults and children alike come to visit the thermal baths. Salto is a city which lives off agriculture: citrus fruits; grapes used to make Tannat, a wine of national importance. Blueberries have also started being grown recently. Tourism and husbandry have been around for some time. Local historians say that Salto was founded on 8 November 1756 by José Joaquin de Viana, the Spanish governor of the Eastern Strip. Whilst travelling to meet Marqués de Valdelirios, the monarch’s representative in outlining the boundaries, and his Portuguese counterpart, Viana stopped off in the area for a few months and built the first settlement which was made up of a few shacks for the troupes and warehouses for the cargo. Today life in Salto flows from east to west along the Calle Uruguay, the road that cuts across the centre to end up in the park which is the doorway to Rio Uruguay. There, amidst the poles, large birds hunt for insects and the white façade of the regional government building is reflected in the water. Clothes shops, bookshops, speakers pumping music in front of the shops, restaurants, bureaux de change, banks, bars, slow crawling traffic between the coloured houses. As you walk to the river, on the right there is Calle Joaquín Suárez and here, at number 39, you can see one of the most incredible monuments of Salto: the Larrañaga Theatre. It is a neoclassical building with large white pillars, blue doors, red velvet everywhere, golden frescoes and crystal lampshades: a jewel set between crumbling houses. It was an English engineer, Robert Alfred Wilkinson from Ferrocarril Noroeste, who designed it. It was opened on 6 October 1882 to a grand performance of La Hija Unica by the Italian drama company of Oreste Cartocci, interpreted by Gustavo Salvini.

That wonderful soirée was the first of a number of outstanding shows with artists such as Luisa Tetrazzini, Teresa Mariani and Leopoldo Fregoli putting on performances there. After years of neglect and various urban myths about the place being haunted, in 2009 it was restored to its former glory and the museum now has various shows, operas, concerts and plays which honour the legacy of the theatre. In 1912, suite number 32 of the Hotel Concordia was home to Carlos Gardel after one of his performances.

Salto’s past is set in history via a futurist monolith dedicated to Casa di Quiroga. The ‘hero of two worlds’ lived here between 1845 and 1846 and took part in the battles of Itapebi and San Antonio in the Uruguayan Civil War. Casa di Quiroga, aka the Horacio Quiroga Mausoleum, Museum and Cultural Centre, is an ancient building in Avenida General Viera. At one time this was a holiday home. Nowadays it hosts an exhibition of various objects and the urn containing the ashes of Horacio Quiroga, narrator and playwright, modern poet and short story writer, who wrote about the Latin American world. Many have compared him to Edgar Allan Poe, author of ‘The Mask of the Red Death’, who Quiroga considered a master of his art. A dramatic life marked by death, hunting accidents and suicide. His tales, ‘Stories of Love, Madness and Death’, ‘The Wild’ and ‘The Beheaded Chicken’ are obligatory reading for school pupils in Salto.

Today the famous men of the city are not the same as the ones of old. Two massive Intendencia de Salto advertising boards hang over the main street: huge images of Edinson Cavani and Luis Suárez wearing the light blue shirt. The images are merged with blurred images of carnival dancers, the other main attraction in Salto. The carnival is a week of parades where candombe, batucada and samba merge with African and European rhythms. The drums boom and the carnival queens parade along as though they were in Rio de Janeiro.

It is not just the local council using the image of the footballers. At the crossroads between Sarandi and Calle Uruguay, Suárez’s beaming smile reminds passers-by that ‘Winning is easy’. Or at least that is what the Barcelona number 9 is saying in order to promote Cablevision, a local cable TV company.

Luis Alberto Suárez Diaz’s first house is about twenty blocks from the centre of town. It was in this ramshackle house located on top of a hill in Barrio El Cerro that the star lived the first years of his life. Suárez was born on 24 January 1987 in Salto’s hospital. He was the fourth son of Sandra and Rodolfo. Before him came Paolo, Giovanna and Leticia and after him came Maximiliano and Diego. A healthy kid who, unlike his brothers and sisters, did not even get the dreaded chickenpox. However, at two years old, he gave his parents a fright when he became ill with appendicitis and then two days after the operation he got peritonitis. The pain was unbearable and the little Suárez could not even stand up. It was simply an unforeseen complication after a routine operation. The doctors had to re-open the wound and sort it out. Slowly but surely, the intestinal infection healed and Suárez got better.

He was a scrawny kid with a full head of dark hair; his friends and family gave him the nickname, ‘Cabeza’ or ‘Cabezón’ (‘Big Head’).

Lila Píriz, Luis’s grandmother on his father’s side, was waiting in the patio at the house in Calle Ozimane. She waited a moment before opening the gate. She apologised for not being able to invite the visitor into the dining room. There were people sleeping there. The next day there was going to be a big party for the 60-year anniversary of her marriage to Atasildo Suárez. He was 21 years old and she fifteen when they got married. They had six children, who in turn gave them 23 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren. Many of them had come over from Montevideo to celebrate. Two women were in the kitchen starting the preparations: huge loaves of bread were being stacked in a pile. Outside on the patio, where a green parrot was squawking in its cage, Lila warned the visitors not to go near him: ‘He will bite your hand off if you put your finger anywhere near the cage’. Atasildo, dark eyed and with a cap on his head, was resting on a deckchair. In the background, the fields and green landscape of Salto stretched into the distance. Lila talked about her grandson, ‘El Cheo’ as she called him: ‘He was a good kid and football was everything for him. He played from dawn till dusk. He was always polite with everyone. It’s been several years since he upped and left, first for Montevideo and then to Europe.’ Luis could not make the 60th wedding anniversary celebrations. Atasildo continued: ‘But for us, knowing what he has achieved and where he has got to makes us very proud.’ The grandparents made no further comments on the subject.

Many have come from all over – England, Japan, you name it – to get the lowdown on the Suárez family. Many a rumour has been spread in Salto about this family.

The rumours started in the first months of 2014 when a local newspaper ran a story that María Josefa Reyes la Pelusa, 65 years old, Luis’ grandmother on his mother’s side, had come back to Salto as she was not well and she did not have a house to live in. The papers ran amok, smelling the blood of a scandal which they could exploit to sell papers. There were accusations of her son asking the local council to build her a house; snipes about Luis not digging into his pockets to help out his poorly grandma; rumours that Luis was not even aware of the situation or that he was and that he had sent money. The upshot was that it was a family issue which was no business of anyone else but the family.

Luis’s father Rodolfo Suárez was in the military, just like his own father had been: Batallón de Infantería 7 Ituzaingó (Ituzaingó 7th battalion), an institution which was 100 years old in 2010. Pepe Mujica paid homage to the institution as a sign of rapprochement