Suarez: If I made Gerrard error I would have struggled to play on

The slip that Suarez is referring to is Steven Gerrard’s unfortunate tumble during Liverpool’s match with Chelsea at the backend of last season.

Liverpool were on an 11-game winning streak and only needed seven points from their remaining three games to claim a first title since 1989-90, but Gerrard’s aberration allowed Demba Ba a clean run on goal and set the London club on their way to a 2-0 win at Anfield.

It was the catalyst for Liverpool’s late surge for the Premier League title to come unstuck and Suarez has written in his autobiography, which is being serialised in the Guardian, that he would have struggled to play on had he made the mistake.

"If I had been in Stevie's shoes, I don't know if I would have been able to carry on playing. Emotionally, it must have been very, very hard.”

Having lost that game, Liverpool let slip a three-goal lead in their next fixture against Crystal Palace to hand the title initiative back to Manchester City, who went on to secure a second league crown in three years by two points.

"In the previous weeks, so much had been said about him, the expectation had built so much, the talk had been about him leading Liverpool, his club, to a first title in over 20 years, on the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, in which his cousin had died, and then that happens,” he continued.

"The captain, the former youth-teamer, the one-club man, a Scouser born and bred, and he was the unlucky one to make a crucial mistake."

Suarez reserved his harshest criticism for Chelsea’s tactics, though.

“We knew that if they wanted to win the league – and people forget that they still had a chance to do that – they would have to play to win. For them to try to waste time when the draw was no good to them was something that I didn’t understand,” the Uruguayan added.