Former Liverpool striker Luis Suarez has claimed that he would have been tempted to retire from football had he been in Steven Gerrard's shoes following his slip-up against Chelsea last season.
The Reds skipper lost his footing with the game locked at 0-0, allowing Demba Ba to race through on goal and put Chelsea ahead.
Jose Mourinho's charges went on to win the clash 2-0 which ended Liverpool's 11-game winning run, with Manchester City overcoming a six-point deficit to win the Premier League title.
"If I had been in Stevie's shoes, I don't know if I would have been able to carry on playing," Suarez, who joined Barcelona in the summer, is quoted as saying by The Guardian. "Emotionally, it must have been very, very hard.
"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.
"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. He still hadn't won the league title. Stevie had started to believe, we all had. And now it had been virtually taken away from him and like that, with him slipping against Chelsea. I'm convinced that if Chelsea had not scored like that, they would not have scored at all. And once you are a goal down against them, it's virtually impossible."
Suarez has featured twice for Barcelona since returning from his four-month biting ban.
Daniel Lewis
