Daniel Sturridge has reminisced about his famed partnership with Luis Suarez, admitting that he wished he could’ve played alongside the Uruguayan for longer at Liverpool.
The pair only played together for around 18 months, with the duo’s peak coming during the 2013/14 season in which they combined to score a remarkable 52 Premier League goals between them.
Those goals brought the Reds to the brink of a first ever Premier League, with Steven Gerrard’s slip and a collapse at Selhurst Park ultimately seeing them miss out on the title by just two points.
After that incredible season, Sturridge’s Liverpool career would wind down earlier than expected due to a myriad of injury concerns, while Suarez was soon snapped up by Barcelona – where he’d win the UEFA Champions League.
Re-living the partnership with Suarez while on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football, Sturridge gave an insight into why the pair worked so well together and why they are regarded as one of the best striking duos in the league’s history.
“We hit it off instantly. We just had that thing where we know where each other would be. It was a joy to play with him. I wish I could have played with him longer because it was only a season and a half,” he said.
“Our partnership was almost like two players who had individual technical abilities to score goals on their own, but could also create for each other. That’’s what probably made us such a good partnership.
“When we played a split diamond [midfield] I’d be all the way over on the right, he’d be all the way over on the left but we’d still look for each other or we’d cause the opposition more problems by doing that. We did [speak about it]. I’d have conversations like, ‘If I see you I’m going to play you [in], if you see me you play me in, round the box we make combinations, we’ve got to make things happen’. That was our mentality.
“We know we have to score goals, that’s our job, so we’ve got to be as creative as we possibly can be. I’d’be right wing, sometimes left wing, he’d be left wing, sometimes right wing, and one of us would be up front depending on the tactics that Brendan [Rodgers] did.
“I felt like with our partnership it was different, and I do include [Raheem] Sterling into it as well, I think Raheem was pivotal in what we were doing at the time. With me and Suarez it was a case of two individual guys with technical abilities that when they combined were causing problems everywhere.”
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