In Chinese philosophy there is something called Wu Wei. This involves doing things by not doing things, becoming like the bamboo in the field, passive and indolent, living without resistance. Not the kind of passive you’re thinking about. Not passive in the sense of lying on the sofa watching the Test match with the curtains drawn for so long that when you get up to answer the doorbell both your legs have gone to sleep and you fall flat on the carpet in a mess of biscuit crumbs and existential angst.

No, not that kind of passive at all. In Wu Wei to be idle is to be alert and toned and clean-shaven. To be passive is to be a part of the world around you, knitted into its currents, a master of human affairs by remaining both within and apart from them. And yes, Wu Wei does sound quite complicated.

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It is also not an idea you’d naturally associate with the endlessly harrying Luis Suárez, the most fretful and relentless of footballers, who was back in England this week with Barcelona for the Champions League defeat of Tottenham Hotspur.

It probably got a bit lost in the plaudits for Lionel Messi’s outstanding performance of being Lionel Messi, but Suárez was also brilliant at Wembley. His movement in particular was startlingly good. Time and again Suárez went veering from right to left and then back again, bristling with gleeful menace, a Willy Wonka-ish figure, waggling his cane around, constantly hustling you off down the nearest wrong turn.

In the middle of this Suárez produced two moments that didn’t register in the stats and that won’t count as assists or completed passes. Both moments involved stepping in and then out of the game at exactly the right moment. Both created goals for Messi. Suárez may be a relentlessly physical player, a source of constant kidney-jabbing hustle. But he showed at Wembley that he is also a master of an art that can often slip between the lines, a king of the dummy.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. The dummy may involve stepping out of the currents, allowing football to happen around you. But it is also one of the most subversive and mischievous things you can do on a football pitch. Not to mention something of a rarity in an increasingly processed sport.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luis Suárez skips past Davinson Sanchez. Photograph: Richard Calver/REX/Shutterstock

There are two types. Most common is the dribbler’s dummy, a feint that allows the ball to run on its path past some briefly hypnotised opponent. Ronaldinho could beat a player just by dancing him into the ground. More classical is the ghost-dummy, allowing the ball to run past or through your legs, acting only as a point of misdirection, becoming in that moment a non-player. It was this kind of dummy that Suárez brought to Wembley.

Dummy No 1 had an added creative element. As Jordi Alba crossed ahead of Barcelona’s third goal Suárez stepped away from the ball but also feigned to shoot, drawing Toby Alderweireld with him and giving Messi an extra beat in which to measure his finish. In that moment you got a flash of the beeping, whirring radar screen inside the Suárez head, that airdrop telepathy with Messi, whose position he never once lost.

The second dummy was more outrageous, evidence of a man with his footballing third eye wide open even as the game entered its final moments. The ball was played diagonally into the Spurs box. At which point Suárez sprinted away from it with a show of theatrical urgency, taking Davinson Sánchez with him towards the corner flag to allow Messi to finally put the game beyond the home side. It was a funny dummy, one of those moments of cunning that make you want to snort with laughter. But it was also a little sad watching Davinson wandering off, a man suddenly in the wrong movie. Squint at that part of the Wembley pitch as the night thickens above the floodlights and perhaps we’ll always have an echo of that lost Davinson, the ghost Davinson trapped between the lines.

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Two things were clear watching all this. First, the dummy really is the most captivating piece of anti-skill. It has an absurd quality to it, the act of standing outside the spectacle while also affecting it decisively. Imagine a midweek five-a-side team made up entirely of mid-1960s Parisian Situationist anarchists. Now imagine the sheer number of dummies performed by that five-a-side team in each of its brawlingly inept 15-0 defeats, slouching about the astro, puffing on filterless cigarettes, producing more dummies than actual touches, a team devoted entirely to parodic inaction.

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This is perhaps a part of the reason the dummy has gone out of fashion. It is a chancy, loose kind of skill. Dummying the ball is the opposite of control and possession and minimising risk. Anyone who has played any kind of football will know you can’t really coach dummies. Soccer Tactics And Skills, the FA’s coaching handbook of the 1980s, has no mention of the dummy at all, just plenty of stuff about small number grid practice drills and Lofted Passes: Long.

Even the most technically complete modern academy players tend to be more mannered, taught to take the ball and protect it, to complete their passes, to shield possession above all. Whereas what Suárez did at Wembley was to offer a breath of something else entirely, street football skills executed with ruthless incision; and a moment to remind us this game can still feel like a world of pure imagination.