Uruguay’s Suarez takes one for the team | World Cup 2010

JOHANNESBURG – The World Cup has been around for 80 years but never has there been a finish as heart-rending, as emotional and as downright crazy as Uruguay’s quarterfinal victory over Ghana at Soccer City on Friday night.

It had everything. Drama so implausible that it couldn’t have been scripted. Tears by the bucketload. The most sympathetic of fall guys. And, amid it all, the man who made possible the most intoxicating few minutes of sporting theater you could ever wish to see did so with an illegal handball that looked set to make him the villain.

Luis Suarez is known for scoring goals, not stopping them. A forward by trade, he has hit the net three times already in this World Cup. Yet no goal he scores in his career may be as important as the split-second decision to throw up his hand to keep out what would have been a winning goal for Ghana and keep Uruguay’s hopes dangling by a thread.

Suarez’s action earned him a straight red card and gave Ghana a penalty kick to win the game and reach the semifinals. As he wandered toward the locker room with his head in his hands, tears started to form in the corner of his eyes.

But then Ghana’s Asamoah Gyan smashed his kick against the crossbar, sending the game to a decisive round of penalty kicks instead of sealing victory for the African side.

A few minutes later, thanks to a pair of saves from Uruguayan goalkeeper Fernando Muslera, the South American team came back from the brink to keep its tournament alive. And Suarez, suddenly, magically, was a hero.

“It all happened very quickly,” Suarez said. “But instinctively I must have known that I had to do whatever it took to keep the ball out of the goal. I couldn’t get my head near it so I had to use my hands. I had to sacrifice myself for the team and the country.”

For Suarez it is a true sacrifice. Uruguay, a two-time World Cup champion, has not reached a semifinal since 1970 and Tuesday’s showdown with the Netherlands at Cape Town’s Green Point Stadium is a monumental game in that country’s history. But Suarez will sit it out, serving a suspension as a result of the red card handed out by referee Olegario Benquerenca from Portugal.

“For me he is a hero,” said Diego Forlan, Suarez’s attacking partner. “If he hadn’t stopped the ball we were finished. It would have been a goal, the game would have been over and so would our World Cup.

“He put the team first, and he gave us a chance. Thankfully, we took it. Now we will try for the final.”

Forlan pulled Uruguay level with a superb free kick after 55 minutes, curling the ball over the Ghana wall and past goalkeeper Richard Kingson. Just before the break, Sulley Muntari had put Ghana in front with a left-footed strike from nearly 40 yards out.

“Crazy doesn’t describe this,” Uruguay coach Oscar Tabarez said. “I have never known a match like this, with so much drama and everything happening in just a few minutes at the end.

“This is beyond crazy. For this to happen in the World Cup quarterfinal is amazing. We were very close to going out but we kept going and we kept fighting. Somehow we got through.”

This was a night where the result could have gone either way. A desperate double-armed flail on the goal line had Uruguay’s World Cup campaign flash before its eyes.

“It wasn’t really a choice,” Suarez said. “It just had to be done. It is disappointing to miss the semifinal but there was nothing else for me to do. I had the opportunity to give us some small chance, and I took it.”