Uruguay Faces Anxious Wait Over Suarez Knee Injury

A nation was thrown into turmoil yesterday when an innocuous challenge in training threatened to remove the star player from a two-time World Cup winner and a dark horse bet to win again this year. Ricky Rothstein reports.

Luis Suarez felt pain in his knee while training with Uruguay earlier this morning. The medics took a look and concluded that Suarez had somehow damaged the meniscus in his knee – that’s the little piece of cartilage that keeps the thigh and shin bones from scraping against each other and absorbs shocks from the ground as you’re walking or running.

Suarez underwent keyhole surgery and both his mother and the secretary of the Uruguayan Football Association, Roberto Pastoriza, have gone on the record to say that the player will recover in time for the World Cup – if not for the first game against Costa Rica on June 14th, certainly for the crucial second game against England on June 19th in Sao Paolo.

Suarez and the Uruguayan medical team will do all in their power to bring him back to full fitness but while Suarez may take the field in Fortaleza or Sao Paolo he will definitely miss four weeks’ training between now and then. Having the winner of the Premier League’s Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year Award laid up in hospital eating grapes to kill the time was in nobody’s pre-World Cup plan.

Download Our Fantastic World-Cup Wallchart Here!

And now head coach Oscar Tabarez has to figure out Plan B – what will Uruguay do if Suarez can’t play? The obvious replacement is veteran Diego Forlan, who played such a starring role in Uruguay’s run to the semi-finals in South Africa four years ago. The problem with Forlan is that he’s 35 years old and currently playing for Cerezo Osaka in the J-League in Japan. Not only is he over-the-hill, he can no longer see it in the rear-view mirror.

And that puts a lot of pressure on Edinson Cavani, Suarez’s international striking partner, to step up and lead the line with Suarez out. Cavani’s strike rate is similar to Suarez’s – a goal every three games, as opposed to a goal every 2.75 – but the difference in expectation between the two men is clear in their odds to win the Golden Boot at Brazil 2014. Suarez is 14/1 with Sports Interaction, while Cavani is more than twice the price at 36/1.

Uruguay is a tiny country of a little over three million people, but perennial soccer royalty because of its World Cup wins in 1930 and – famously –1950. Every one of those three million people is in for a nervous wait on Luis Suarez’s return to fitness.