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Luis Suarez has said he would have found it difficult to carry on playing had he, rather than Steven Gerrard, made the mistake that led to Liverpool's crucial 2-0 defeat to Chelsea in last season's title run-in. Chelsea return to Anfield for the first time since that match, with Liverpool so far failing to replicate the form that brought them so close to being crowned champions. In April, with the Reds top of the Premier League table after 11 straight wins, Gerrard slipped to enable Demba Ba to run through and open the scoring in front of the Kop as the Londoners kept their own title hopes alive. Liverpool's hopes of a first championship since 1990 were effectively extinguished when they lost a 3-0 lead to draw 3-3 at Crystal Palace in a dramatic late collapse the following week. Suarez, who scored 31 Premier League goals as Liverpool eventually finished second to Manchester City, moved to Barcelona in a 75 million-pound deal over the summer. In his autobiography 'Crossing the Line,' quoted in the Daily Mirror, he wrote: "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. "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." #INSERT type:image caption:Steven Gerrard's slip against Chelsea proved crucial in the title race. END# Suarez said he believed Jose Mourinho's side would not have scored at all that day without Gerrard's mistake, blasting them for tactics which he said claimed saw them wasting time "from the very start." "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," he wrote. "For them to try to waste time when the draw was no good to them was something that I didn't understand." He said one Blues player had told him that if Mourinho "makes us play like this, I have to play like this." Suarez admitted that Liverpool had not played well that day but added: "There was nothing we could have done differently. We had 10 players in front of us, almost all of them in the penalty area." And he concluded: "Mourinho knew: if you waste time, if you break it up from the very start, they're going to get frustrated, they're going to play a bit more crazily, they'll do anything. They pulled us out of our normal routine."
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