Some players you sing about because they win you things. Others you sing about because you cannot take your eyes off them when they play, whatever the scoreboard says and whatever they have got themselves into that week. Luis Suárez was firmly in the second camp and the song the Kop gave him captured the feeling perfectly. They just couldn’t get enough of him, even when he made it very hard to defend him. The Suárez chant was sung to the tune of Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough, a bouncy 1981 synth-pop number that lends itself surprisingly well to a football ground.
The words are about the pure devotion that everyone felt for the crazy Uruguayan forward, running through the reasons the striker had the crowd eating out of his hand, with the ‘I just can’t get enough’ hook coming round again and again between the do-do-do-do bits that everyone could join in with. It was a happy, daft, affectionate song and that tells you something. For all the trouble that followed Suárez around, the supporters who watched him week in, week out simply adored him. It is not hard to see why.
Suárez arrived from Ajax in the January of 2011 and quickly became one of the most watchable forwards the club has had in the modern era. He worked like a man possessed, scored goals of every description and dragged an otherwise ordinary Liverpool side up the table more or less by himself. His 2013-14 season was extraordinary. He scored 31 league goals, won the PFA Player of the Year award and spearheaded a title challenge that came within touching distance before falling away in the closing weeks. For a few months that spring, watching Liverpool was as thrilling as it had been in years.
Sadly, you cannot tell the story of Luis Suárez’s time at Liverpool without the other side of it. In 2011 he was found guilty by the Football Association of racially abusing Patrice Evra, resulting in him being banned for eight matches. It was a serious matter that the club, it has to be said, handled poorly at the time. In the April of 2013 he bit Branislav Ivanović during a game against Chelsea and was banned for ten matches. Then, having very nearly won us the league, he bit an opponent again at the 2014 World Cup and left that summer for Barcelona.
This is not, therefore, a straightforward hero. Suárez was a brilliant footballer and, on more than one occasion, an indefensible one. Plenty of fans of other clubs will never understand why Anfield took to him so completely and, given some of what he did, that is a fair enough position to hold. He fitted very neatly into the classic bracket of, ‘He was a bastard, but he was our bastard’. The song isn’t sung very often. Instead, it is brought out with others when the Kop is in a party mood and decides to go through the old favourites.
Part of that is nostalgia for how good he was and part of it is the simple fact that a great chant tends to outlive the player it was written for. When you strip it back, I Just Can’t Get Enough was always an honest summary of how supporters felt watching him, being exhilarated, occasionally exasperated and never once bored.
Here are the lyrics:
His name is Luis Suárez,
He wears the famous Red,
I just can’t get enough,
I just can’t get enough.
When he scores a volley
Or when he scores a head,
I just can’t get enough,
I just can’t get enough.
He scores a goal
And the Kop goes wild
And I just can’t seem to
Get enough, Suárez!
