Luis Suarez has played down the incident with Atletico Madrid defender Diego Godin.
The former appeared to elbow the latter in the recent Champions League game between Barcelona and Atletico Madrid at the Vicente Calderon. Barcelona suffered a 2-0 defeat, which led to their exit from the competition at the quarter-final stage. The 3-2 defeat on aggregate means that one more team fails in its attempts to retain the Champions League. No team has managed to win this competition in back-to-back campaigns since its inception in 1992. Barcelona had been suffering from poor form coming into the game.
Up until the recent El Clasico defeat, they had gone almost 40 games in all competitions without a loss. Now, there is a danger of the club suffering a crisis since their league advantage has also been wiped out in recent weeks. It was only a few weeks ago that they seemed like walking away with the title on all fronts. Suarez remains confident that Barcelona can reclaim their form. He played down the incident with Godin saying that such incidents happen on the pitch inadvertently. He has since been in touch with his Uruguay international teammate, who he has called as his friend, in order to apologise for the action.
“I’m friends with Diego. The last game, with the elbow, he knows that I didn’t mean to touch, nor was that clear to me when it happened. After the game, I went to greet him and we spoke about it. These are things that happen on the pitch and people shouldn’t worry about them. It’s our way of playing. We’ve been on a very negative and surprising run, where we’ve created many chances but they’ve not gone in.We still have a chance of winning two trophies. There’s an abundance of quality in this squad,” said Suarez.