Watching the dynamic between manager and striker during this period made Carragher ponder his own future in the game. “I looked at that and thought, ‘Is this what management is?’ I’d probably have grabbed Torres by the throat. But Hodgson had to put up with it all because he had nothing else to fall back on. He had to tell him he was doing well when he wasn’t, try to find some confidence and enthusiasm in him.”
Back in Madrid, Torres dismissed these claims he threw the towel in. The statistics do not help his cause, though. Aside from those two goals against Chelsea, there were just three others in the league in 2010-11 before the transfer window opened again.
He reasoned that he never felt fit enough to lead Liverpool’s line in the way he had previously. Having had hardly any break because of his participation in the World Cup, he felt a pressure to return to Melwood early because of Liverpool’s well-documented problems. That didn’t mean he could solve them.
Most of all, he was insistent he did not have a bad relationship with Hodgson, describing him as “a great coach and a great guy.” He was not so positive about the backroom staff assembled by Purslow, however. That included a new Australian medical and fitness team who he thought had too much power – dictating who Hodgson could and could not play, sometimes including Torres. “He [Hodgson] was not allowed to work properly – the situation was more difficult for him than anyone else. From pre-season to January, it was a nightmare,” Torres remembered.
Though Liverpool were finally sold to New England Sports Ventures (a precursor to FSG) in the middle of this period, Torres remained unconvinced the club were heading in the right direction. His immediate point of contact regarding his own future became Comolli, the director of football hired by NESV to front recruitment and player sales. Comolli had enjoyed mixed success as Tottenham Hotspur’s sporting director, with several players achieving success there long after his own departure.
Comolli seems to hold a special place in the mind of Torres, a figure who was key in ensuring that he ended up leaving.
To Torres, Comolli was the same as Purslow – someone who told him he had to stay because Liverpool did not have the star quality to replace him immediately but not because he wanted him in the long term.
Comolli told him Suarez was arriving from Ajax, “but Suarez is not going to score too many goals.” Comolli also told Torres that the new owners wanted to build something new with younger players. Two months away from turning 27, it concerned him how long it would take Liverpool to reach the top again.
The club’s next big decision was to sack Hodgson in early January and replace him with Kenny Dalglish. In Hodgson’s last game, Liverpool lost 3-1 away to Blackburn Rovers and the outgoing manager, whose reign proved to be the shortest in club history, was serenaded by supporters in the away end with the chant: “Hodgson for England.” It was believed that Dalglish could restore some identity at a club that had lost its institutional memory at the very top. His status on Merseyside was at a papal level.
Torres felt like he could trust Dalglish. They had spoken many times before, in the hospitality lounges of Anfield where the former Liverpool player and manager worked as a club ambassador. He told the Scot about the broken promises and disappointing conversations with Purslow and Comolli. With that, the team’s form improved and Torres started scoring — three in Dalglish’s first five games.
It was a week before the closure of the January transfer window when Torres met Dalglish again. Chelsea’s interest had not gone away and their representatives were negotiating privately with Comolli.
Torres says he did not ask to leave and was hoping Dalglish might make him feel wanted and reassure him of Liverpool’s intentions as a team – getting at least closer to the title than they were under Benitez just 20 months earlier. Yet Torres says he felt let down by Dalglish, who seemed to tell him one thing only to do another by agreeing to sell him. It was Torres’ opinion that Dalglish was out of his depth dealing with such sensitive issues in his early days back in management following 12 years away.
Within a couple of hours of their meeting at Melwood, stories had started to circulate in the press about Torres “verbally” requesting a transfer.
Dalglish had listened to Torres and concluded that neither his mind or heart was at Liverpool. Torres had not shown him that he was truly committed. Having initially been given his old job back on a temporary basis, Dalglish now wanted it full time and for that to happen he needed everyone pulling in the same direction. A distraction such as this one could undermine his own intentions.
Torres had been a fine player for Liverpool but, from a distance, fellow striker Dalglish had been alarmed by his drop in his standards. Was it to do with commitment or was his body not allowing to him reach the levels he’d got to in his first 18 months at Anfield?
Meanwhile, Torres was furious that some details from a private conversation had become public. He saw this as an attempt to sully his name, making him take “maximum responsibility” before the club got what they really wanted – a record fee. “Mascherano,” he said, “had the same treatment.”
Comolli, Torres explained, had wanted to be in the meeting with Dalglish but Torres had told the manager he only wanted to see him because he never felt like he got a straight answer from Comolli. He was left wondering whether Dalglish had left the room and divulged some of the more private concerns. Either way, it now “felt like there was nobody to trust – the stories in the press changed the view of everybody, including myself.”
Torres had not used his agent to speak on his behalf. Each time he talked to Purslow, Comolli and Dalglish, it was in person. He regretted that decision especially. Maybe he had been too honest – too emotional. Maybe he could have been more succinct. Any transfer request had to appear in writing for a move to be forced through and now he felt like he had no other option.
To supporters, this confirmed him as a traitor. In Torres’ eyes, nobody at Liverpool was willing to admit there was a problem with the whole team or present an ambitious vision of the future which included a bold, winning culture. Instead, only he could be the villain.
“They had to find a guilty one,” he said, his eyes sharpening.
Later in 2016, the long-running battle between Mill Financial, George Gillett – Liverpool’s former owner – and Royal Bank of Scotland reached a New York courtroom.
Documents from 2010, when Mill were competing to buy Liverpool, revealed that New England Sports Ventures (now Fenway Sports Group) viewed both Torres and goalkeeper Pepe Reina as being “probably beyond their primes.”
Two years after Torres was sold to Chelsea, Reina – another of the squad’s highest earners – was allowed to leave, initially on loan to Napoli. History, it is fair to say, reflected well on FSG’s financial judgement because neither player ever again scaled the heights reached at Liverpool. Standards had slipped and trading profits were reached on both.
Ultimately, however, each player’s replacement was not an improvement – particularly Torres’. Though Andy Carroll scored in two of his three Merseyside derbies – the second, crucially, a late winner in a 2012 FA Cup semi-final, they were two of just 11 goals across two injury-hit seasons as a Liverpool player.
Torres told me he cried that day he left Liverpool, as the helicopter took off from John Lennon Airport and flew over the scudding waters of the Mersey.
He could understand the reaction of the Liverpool supporters who torched his shirt and hurled objects at him on his Chelsea debut. “It was not their fault,” he said, remembering how they had once made him feel “like a king.”
At Anfield, he always felt like he could score every game. As Atletico’s captain, there had been the crushing pressure of being the supremely talented local lad in an underachieving team. At Chelsea, he always felt the need to justify his huge price tag and struggled to mix in a dressing room filled with superstars and enormous egos. He would achieve the winner’s medals he craved but only then did he realise that “maybe it was enough for me…”
This made him think about his first 18 months at Liverpool, where he felt like a significant player in a talented team, where he gained strength from the goodwill of Anfield and there were still a few others Liverpool could turn to in order to win games if he wasn’t quite on form – the way it needed to be for him to flourish.
“The atmosphere was magic,” he smiled dolefully, seeming to know he would never feel such a connection again.
https://theathletic.com/1582851/202...atletico-madrid-chelsea?source=shared-article