It took Barcelona just 11 minutes to take the lead against Deportivo back in April, their familiar talisman wheeling away in celebration after a typically crafty finish to be mobbed by his team-mates. The Catalans had endured their biggest slump in years, picking up one point from a possible 12 and watching as their stranglehold on the title loosened. But it was not Lionel Messi who came to the rescue.
As has been the case increasingly often this season, it was Luis Suarez who stole the headlines and got Barca back on track. Four goals in the drubbing of Depor, seven more in the three games that preceded Saturday's finale, and crisis averted. For so long Barca have looked to just one man to bail them out and provide inspiration. Now they have a second superstar operating on an otherworldly level.
That Suarez-led resurgence proved vital in reasserting Barca's dominant swagger, and he finished the job in Granada to leave Real Madrid broken-hearted. While Cristiano Ronaldo was suuu-ing pointlessly in La Coruna, Suarez was tapping in from close range. The points were virtually assured when he headed home Dani Alves' athletic cross minutes later, before he completed his hat-trick late on. With three instinctive flashes, the title had been won.
Suarez’s form this season has been quite extraordinary, even in spite of the sense of normality Ronaldo and Messi’s stunning scoring records have bestowed on such feats. The Uruguayan has outscored five teams in La Liga and netted 59 goals in all competitions, exceeding his own personal best tally of 55 while still at Ajax six years ago - and that included goals for Uruguay. He is also the joint-leading assist-maker in La Liga, meaning no player in the top five leagues has contributed more goals.
He’s even done things the best two players in the world have never managed, scoring four goals in back-to-back matches and having a hand in seven goals in a single La Liga match, the only player to do so in the 21st Century. Unless Atletico Madrid do something incredible, he will also be the first player to top both the goals and assists charts at the end of a Liga season.
Even more impressively, and unlike the elite company he now keeps, he has done all this in a team that was not built around him. He was supposed to be the wing-man, but is fast becoming the main man.
At the Bernabeu, there is a sense that Ronaldo is pandered to – some have even gone further, saying the side lack balance and solidity when he plays – and that he scores mainly in irrelevant games (something that Madrid’s record of never winning the title when Ronaldo is top-scorer attests to). Messi, likewise, is the focal point for Barca, and plenty of signings – from David Villa to Alexis Sanchez – have struggled to deal with the shadow he casts.
Suarez was bought predominantly to ease the goalscoring load on the diminutive Argentine. But he has done far more than that. This season he has displaced him as the go-to man in attack, consistently unlocking otherwise impenetrable defences to bail out Barca and allowing his partner in crime to sit a little deeper, pulling strings rather than finishing off sweeping moves. A natural evolution, you suspect.
Despite his phenomenal returns since swapping Merseyside for Catalonia, Suarez initially feared he would not be able to adapt to what had been a possession-heavy, tiki-taka style. “I never imagined that I would be scoring goals here, I never felt I would adapt to this team's style of play the way I have,” he told ESPN in the build-up to Saturday’s match.
This season has brought a slight shift, a greater degree of trust in the 29-year-old. “Most of my team-mates, like Messi or Neymar, have been looking to pick me out more, without me telling them, to give me options to score. It shows our team ethic. It is an honour to play at Barcelona with these players around me. On the field and off it they have been really important. This season we have shown we are great team-mates.”
In many ways, Barca adapted to Suarez, rather than the other way around, and he embodies so many of the changes Luis Enrique has made to the Pep Guardiola blueprint at Barca. They are more direct, more efficient, counter-attack with blistering piece and are dominant on set-pieces, with much of that improvement from dead-ball situations coming courtesy of Juan Carlos Unzue’s whiteboard. It was one such pre-planned routine that produced Suarez’s opener against Depor and stopped the rot.
There is a huge sense of irony, too, in the fact that it is Suarez who has created a debate about whether there are now three – not two – players who stand apart from all others. Madrid have spent years searching for such a player, and long considered the possibility of activating Suarez's release clause, but it is Barca who can now count on more bona fide Galacticos.
He rose to the occasion once again against Granada, helping seal the title and the Pichichi trophy in the process – breaking Messi and Ronaldo’s seven-year domination. Past infractions still count against him in the eyes of many, but the hot-headed man who needed a muzzle has come in from the doghouse. More mature, more lethal and now the leader of the Barcelona attack; a second Messi. Madrid must think they’re seeing double.
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