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Torres : On his love for Liverpool (and his Top 10 goals)

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Never going to hate him. Imagine playing for us through the H&G Hodgson times, no surprise he wanted to go.
 
I'm too old now to hate players* ... Good luck to him in all endeavors.

* after much consideration, bar Man City cunts, SPurs cunts, ARsenal cunts etc etc and spit the dog.
 
I have more sympathy for the guy than quite a few of you lot. We all make mistakes and I strongly suspect his head was turned by others whispering in his ear, not just the Chavs but, I'd be willing to bet, his own agents. Regardless of any behind-the-scenes shenanigans at LFC, he dropped the bollock of his life leaving the club and he knew it from the moment he put pen to paper for Chavski - it was written all over him, not only then but a few days later when we went there and handed them their first defeat in yonks on their own cabbage patch. At his best he was tremendous for us and that 4-1 shellacking we gave the Mancs at theirs during his time here, with Torres leading the way, is one of my favourite ever memories in nearly 60 years of being a Red.

Muchas gracias Fernando Torres.
 
Yeah it was shitty that he downed tools so blatantly. As JJ said that 1-4 against Utd was ace though. As was every time he made a twat out of Vidic. I used to love that ad he was in as well "Adios la!" - He had a boss song as well.
 
One of the regrets I have is the way I left the club. With time, I think I could explain the reasons.

Motherfucker! He's just taking the piss now, after spewing that line for the best part of a decade.
 
I think I preferred the narrative (amplified by Carragher in an article for a newspaper) that Liverpool knew he was declining badly and only pretended to be angry, confused and upset when he said he wanted to go to Chelsea, and we were laughing our arses off at the £50m we got for him as part of our cunningly contrived masterplan*.




*that also involved immediately bidding £35m for Andy Carroll in a sign of abject panic and desperation
 
Cracking article from the Athletic this morning regarding Torres and the truth behind the Chelsea Transfer.. Sheds some light on the situation.. Can help but feel he regrets the move sending him in the wrong path..

I always thought he downed tools towards the end of his career with Liverpool this article confirms that but explains the reasons as to why, could hardly blame him to be fair..

Also confirms what I always thought regarding the Mascherano transfer, The club tried to show him up as the Cunt, refusing to play against Manchester City, when in truth the club where open to sell him, because they needed the money..

What a state this club was in.. absolute state..

Read on..

Fernando Torres was staring into a cabinet, the rest of his reflection dominated by a set of dark eyes transfixed on the object beyond the glass. Liverpool’s fifth European Cup had been collected in Istanbul six years earlier.

Behind him in the foyer at the club’s Melwood training ground were a group of advisors, several of them new to me. I had known his agent, Antonio Sanz, since Torres’s arrival on Merseyside, when he was his main man, but over the next three years the entourage had grown. The player was expressionless, alone in his thoughts. Those working on his behalf all seemed to be on mobile phones. These did not appear to be conversations but orders and demands.

It was the final day of the January 2011 transfer window and Melwood felt like an airport terminal. Unfamiliar faces appeared with their suitcases, more familiar ones scurried away with their chins nuzzled into the breasts of their jackets trying to escape the vile winds. Liverpool’s squad were due to train but Torres was not going to join them. I had been scheduled to interview him and despite all the indications he was going to be leaving for Chelsea, I was told to turn up as normal and wait.

At 9am, Torres was there in his jeans, white trainers and white t-shirt but he was not waiting for me. The lights in the foyer had not yet been turned on and this created a peculiar atmosphere, as if all of this wasn’t really happening or, at least, Liverpool were somehow trying to hide a significant moment in an already turbulent season. “He’ll see you before lunch,” I was reassured.

Steven Gerrard also arrived early that day. The door to Melwood’s boot room is hidden away, beneath a staircase leading to the manager’s office and the canteen. Though Torres was right there by the entrance, Gerrard almost walked straight past, barely acknowledging his presence. He had helped persuade him to stay in the past but now Torres was not listening. He had told him a day earlier he was leaving. Reluctantly, Gerrard accepted the decision. Outside, a crowd was gathering. By the end of the night, they were burning Torres’s shirt.

The move to Chelsea would make him the most expensive footballer in British history as well as the sixth costliest of all time. It would be the most lucrative contract he would ever sign at £175,000 a week. He would describe Chelsea as “one of the top-level clubs” in world football. By that implication, Liverpool were not – throwing more fuel on the pyre outside Melwood. “After this, there are no more steps forward,” he said 13 hours later, after being interviewed not by me but by Chelsea’s in-house media team at Stamford Bridge.

He was smiling then. And yet, he did not seem excited as he waited for the deal to be completed. Official negotiations had lasted a fortnight. Perhaps he was simply drained by the uncertainty. Though his attitude was colder than usual and this might have translated into determination, he seemed to me to be worried about the future. His words were mechanical, like he’d rehearsed them. It was as though he was trying to convince himself he was doing the right thing.

I went over and asked him what was going on. There were print deadlines to hit. If he wasn’t going to speak to me, I’d have to fill the space with something else.

Though I wouldn’t claim we knew each other well, we knew each other well enough. He and Sanz had helped when I travelled to Madrid in March 2008 to speak to family and friends about his life. Not many footballers open doors like he did that memorable week and it was clear to me that his love for Liverpool was genuine at that point.

“Shall we get going with this interview?” I asked him innocently, considering the pace of the surrounding activity.

“I am going to sign for Chelsea,” he told me without hesitating.

I felt like pleading with him. No other foreign striker in the club’s history had received such adoration. It felt like he was destined to be here. While still an Atletico Madrid player, he had worn a captain’s armband imprinted with the words You’ll Never Walk Alone.

At Anfield, he’d scored more goals in his debut season than any footballer from outside Britain and 81 in 142 games by the time of his departure. In that process, he’d become — at that time — the fastest Liverpool player ever to 50 league goals. One of those was at Old Trafford where, in March 2009, he shrugged off Nemanja Vidic and helped Liverpool to a 4-1 victory, celebrating by reminding Manchester United supporters Liverpool were five times champions of Europe and their club were not. Everyone believed that he got Liverpool. But Liverpool icons do not leave for Chelsea…

“Why?” I asked him.

Liverpool had new owners. They had re-appointed Kenny Dalglish as manager and results were picking up following a terrible start to the season under Roy Hodgson. Torres was nearly 27. But for a Spanish second division title when he was a teenager, he’d won nothing in a club career already over a decade long.

The story was different at international level, where he’d become a European and then world champion in the space of three summers. This experience had sharpened his senses and motivations. To him, it felt like time was already running out. He turned to the glass cabinet again and inspected its contents. He made it clear why he wanted to move on. The club he’d joined in 2007 had lost a Champions League final six weeks before. It had since lost most of its best players and had lurched towards administration. Liverpool were now seventh in the table, having dropped into the relegation zone in mid-October.

“The team is not the same,” he said quietly, reinforcing his point. “The club is not the same…”

I could not argue convincingly that he was wrong.
 
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The day Fernando Torres left Liverpool, I ended up interviewing Luis Suarez.

There was a ‘what if’ moment when the doors of Melwood slid open, allowing Suarez in at precisely the second Torres was making his escape. They embraced. Suarez was happier to see Torres, whose hold on the Uruguayan lacked energy. His smile was rueful.

Though Suarez had been told by Damien Comolli, the club’s new director of football, that he was being brought in to partner Torres, he did not appear to mind that Comolli’s promise was proving not to be true. Instead, he was excited about a new start.

Suarez seemed to relish the enormous challenge of replacing him. His English was broken but he tried his best and at the end, he held the door open and waited for me to leave the room. I did not get the impression he was capable of a recent past which included a biting ban while an Ajax player, or indeed his future – one which included two further bans for the same offence, as well as other disgraces. He was polite and better at small talk than Torres, despite his limitations around language.

When he said, “Maybe there will be someone else,” it felt as though he was not speculating – that he knew something more. Several hours later, Liverpool signed Andy Carroll from Newcastle for a club record £35 million.

I had not seen Torres in more than five years when I met him next.

Winter was turning into spring and that meant warmth in Madrid, where he was an Atletico player again and attempting to rediscover his sense of self. There had been three full seasons at Chelsea where his search for success was realised by helping the club win the European Cup for the first time as well as the FA Cup in the same month. A year later, he scored in a Europa League final victory. Yet perceptions of him had changed dramatically.

His Chelsea debut came in a 1-0 defeat to Liverpool six days after his departure from Anfield and at Stamford Bridge the travelling supporters who once worshipped him unfurled hastily-created new banners. “He who betrays will always walk alone,” read one. “Breaking News: Ya paid 50 mil 4 Margi Clarke [a blonde Liverpudlian actress],” read another in the colours of the Sky Sports News ticker. That was before he was reminded by Daniel Agger that he was no longer a team-mate via a shoulder charge which knocked the stuffing out of him. Later, he was hit by a cigarette lighter thrown from the away end.

When Carlo Ancelotti decided to make changes, Chelsea’s new No 9 was the first to leave the pitch, his head bowed. The image would become a familiar sight.

In the second half of that season, Torres played 18 times for Chelsea and scored just once. That 2010-11 campaign proved to be the worst of his career. Three full seasons in London would yield just 19 Premier League goals, compared to 56 across the same length of time at Liverpool.

There may have been some mitigation.

Chelsea had five different managers in the three years after his January 2011 arrival. It was only when Rafael Benitez made the surprise decision to accept an interim role in November 2012 that his form picked up, including a burst of seven goals in six games, though never to the levels at Liverpool where Benitez’s system had once helped make him great.

Mostly, Torres seemed possessed by an inner torment, a player ill at ease with the path that he had chosen. There were times when it felt like an impostor was in control of his body and mind. Was somebody else playing in a Torres mask? This was not the matador of Liverpool who made swooshing past raging defenders his easy business but instead a leaden-footed underperformer with the weight of the world on his shoulders whose every miss was met by ridicule.

A loan move to AC Milan in 2014 did not work out (just one goal in 10 appearances there) before he returned to the womb of Atletico aged 29. His best years were behind him but from time to time he would score again, reminding us briefly of the player he once was.

Cautiously, I asked Phil Dickinson, the interpreter who accompanied me in Madrid eight years earlier, to help me reach his agent Antonio Sanz about the possibility of interviewing him and surprisingly the feedback was both quick and positive.

It was his opportunity, I suggested, to set the record straight on the circumstances of his departure from Liverpool in the unlimited space of an entire book chapter. This, replied Sanz, was attractive for him because he appreciated there would be room for necessary context. Any reportage would not be led by a headline. Torres had never spoken on the record about his last months at Liverpool and this left me feeling excited. Rarely do sportsmen open up about sensitive matters concerning their own careers while they are still active but this was Torres giving me two hours of his time and willing, according to his agent, to tell me everything I needed to know.

We were reunited early on a Wednesday morning in March 2016 at Atletico’s training ground in Majadahonda, a well-heeled suburb of Madrid perched on a plateau overlooking the Spanish capital. But for the security staff at the gates of the complex, nobody else was around.

The night before, Torres had been an unused substitute in a 3-0 win at the old Vicente Calderon against Real Sociedad. His popularity remained, with a boys and girls shouting his name every time he left the bench to warm-up. Beneath the floodlights of the Calderon, Torres seemed happy again. Body language had become a natural part of his conversation at Liverpool but even as he jogged down the touchline you could see a freedom in his movement that was not there very often during his time at Chelsea particularly. His shoulders were loose rather than heavy.

Next morning, however, his mood had changed.

He was wearing a heavy woollen jumper, jeans and trainers and his movie star qualities remained. It was always said about Torres that his hair was a reflection of his state of mind, with a blond mop showing he was content and shortened versions indicating he was restless. Here, he was blond again but he nevertheless seemed tense beyond the firm handshake and penetrating eye contact. There was very little conversation as we walked together through the press canteen and towards an anteroom with Sanz, who decided to leave us together with the message: “Ask anything you want…”

It is not an exaggeration to say that the space around us felt like a prison cell and Torres could have passed for a captive war veteran as a small window above him let shards of light cut across his freckled face. Between four featureless concrete walls was a wooden table separating two wooden chairs surely once used in a school classroom.

I did not want the serious atmosphere to make the conversation feel like an interrogation, so I started with questions that I thought might make him feel more at ease.

It must have been a big decision to leave Atletico in the first place, having been made captain at the age of 19. Returning gave him the opportunity to remind the world Atletico was his club. He made it sound like he was fulfilling a civic duty by leaving in the first place because the proceeds of his transfer would allow Atletico to build a team rather than it being centred around one star player.

This was how he started to feel at Liverpool after Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano were sold in successive summers, the club failed to replace them adequately and started to slide down the league table. For 18 months at the beginning, even with some injuries, Torres felt unstoppable and his performances helped push Liverpool close to the title, although he was humble enough to recognise he was only able to reach new levels because of the standard of the talent around him. He loved playing with Steven Gerrard but believed his Liverpool captain suffered just as much as him from the departures of Alonso and Mascherano. “I needed the passes from Stevie but Stevie also needed the passes, which now he was not getting,” he reflected. This led, he thought, to a structural breakdown in the team and as a consequence, the pressure on him grew both physically and mentally. It felt like he was at Atletico again – the burden of responsibility placed around his neck.

“Everything changed,” he thought, “when the owners started talking about selling.” The mind-set then shifted at Melwood, with the departure of Benitez as manager in summer 2010. He had seen this before at Atletico, where players were sold and not all of the money was invested in new blood. “The club was saying, ‘We still want to be the best and we want to win…’ But it was doing the opposite.”

It felt like Torres was building up to something he really wanted to get off his chest. Most of his answers were relatively short initially and he was choosing his words carefully. And then it came, towards the end of a question about the good times at Liverpool, when he and Gerrard were arguably the best partnership in the world. “I’d never felt happier than during my time at Liverpool,” he said. “But then I felt betrayed. That’s the truth.”

The betrayal came in that summer of 2010, in the fortnight after he became a World Cup winner.
 
The club’s financial position had worsened and he was aware of interest from Chelsea and Manchester City through intermediaries with contact to his agent. He had a meeting with Liverpool managing director Christian Purslow in Ibiza to discuss the future.

Purslow had been hired by Tom Hicks and George Gillett in 2009, charged with the responsibility of renegotiating a £350 million loan with Royal Bank of Scotland. Purslow, today at Aston Villa, was an investment banker having emerged from Cambridge University with a degree in modern and medieval languages.

On the first day of pre-season training before the 2009-10 campaign, I had witnessed a heated discussion between him and Benitez in reception at Melwood following a press conference. Newly-appointed Purslow seemed to be telling Benitez how to handle questions relating to the club’s ownership and the manager was not the sort of person who liked to be told what to do, especially as his power base was strong at that point having recently signed a new five-year contract. This will not end well, I concluded.

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Hodgson and Torres in 2010 (Photo by John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

Twelve months later, Benitez was gone and Purslow, along with commercial director Ian Ayre, had recruited Roy Hodgson in his place.

Hodgson was there with Purslow at that meeting in Ibiza. Purslow led the conversation, explaining Liverpool were in the process of being sold to new owners and that it was crucial all their star players remained during this period in order for the club to maintain its value. After that process was over, Torres was told, he could leave if the right offer came along. This made him feel like a piece of meat. Neither Purslow nor Hodgson tried to convince him that Liverpool wanted him to stay for sporting reasons or ideally “for ever” and “be like Stevie.” To Torres, this translated as Purslow only wanting to save himself time.

Torres was furious when Mascherano was then sold to Barcelona a month later. Though the Argentinean had tried harder than him to leave, Torres believed Liverpool attempted to demonise Mascherano by suggesting he’d refused to play against Manchester City, turning supporters against him and making the sale easier to justify. The truth was, new owners had not arrived by the end of August and the club had reached the point where it needed money from player sales. Despite Torres’ attempts to find out what was happening, “nobody would speak.”

This is when some of his relationships started to deteriorate. The warmth between him and Gerrard on the pitch no longer existed. Gerrard too had agonised about Liverpool’s plight – as had Jamie Carragher. Yet both concluded if they got involved in the debate about the future, they would lose focus.

According to Carragher, it simply wasn’t the Liverpool Way to become embroiled in boardroom matters. He had been raised at the academy to respect those operating above him. There were nights when he’d lose sleep over what was happening and quietly he’d try and help supporters campaigning against Hicks and Gillett. But if he and Gerrard stopped trying their hardest to win matches, what would it say about them – not just as professionals but as people?

Both Liverpool’s captain and his deputy believed Torres was selective in his efforts during this period. In his autobiography, Gerrard says the striker “downed tools” completely. “Torres was already agitating for a move but it got worse under Roy,” he concluded. Gerrard could remember walking off the pitch following a bad result, thinking to himself, “We just didn’t have Fernando with us today.”

There were games where it seemed like Torres was reluctant to even move. Gerrard wondered whether it was because he was worried about another injury or that he had transfer business on his mind. It was Gerrard’s impression that Torres did not rate Hodgson as a manager. Meanwhile, the future England boss was miscalculating a lot – not least his public messages to Liverpool supporters as the team’s form collapsed and a place in the relegation frame seemed the new natural habitat.

Gerrard felt sympathy for Hodgson and thinks he might have succeeded had the club been more stable. Yet one of his mistakes was to think Torres was simply out of form when, really, his head was elsewhere. Hodgson devised a training session where as many as seven attacking players faced only three defenders to try to get Torres scoring more goals. “It wouldn’t have mattered what kind of sessions Roy put on,” Gerrard decided. “Torres had little faith in Hodgson and he was just desperate to get away.”

When Gerrard scored against Sunderland having been assisted by Torres, Liverpool’s captain did not recognise the role of his partner – pushing past him and celebrating on his own. When Carragher played a pass into the channel and Torres chose not to chase after it even though Liverpool were losing the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park, Carragher was furious. These were public examples of the breakdown in relationships at Liverpool, which had now spread from the boardroom to the pitch.

Albert Riera and Pepe Reina, international as well as club team-mates with Torres, agreed with Gerrard and Carragher’s assessment that he wasn’t trying as hard for Liverpool as he did for Spain.

Though he scored both goals in a surprise 2-0 November victory over Chelsea, later that night Liverpool’s senior players were privately seething that he’d turned his form on like a tap against a team that supposedly wanted to sign him. Riera recalls nobody congratulating Torres for his spectacular effort in the changing room afterwards while one junior player, with Liverpool’s squad that Sunday afternoon for experience, remembers Torres sitting alone quietly while the rest of the team embraced with one another.

The youth-teamer had never been part of a match-day before so he soaked up every detail, watching and learning as much as he could. “Torres didn’t speak to anyone on the bus to Anfield, in the dressing room before the game or in the warm-up,” he recalled. “Beating Chelsea was a big result because we were so close to the relegation zone but he was the first to leave the dressing room as well. He looked like he didn’t want to be there. I had this impression of a brilliant player but in training in the weeks after beating Chelsea, he barely tried.”

Torres had cut himself adrift, though he’d never been the life and soul of the party anyway.

Carragher could remember when he first joined Liverpool and he struggled to find form in pre-season. At first, Carragher thought both socially and professionally, “God, I’m not getting much out of this one…”

Yet Liverpool’s vice-captain was desperate for him to do well so he brought son James, then four, to Melwood dressed in a new Liverpool kit with Torres’s name on the back. Carragher wanted Torres to feel welcome – most of all, to increase the chances of Liverpool winning more games. Though that happened, he remained distant on a personal level and preferred to spend time with his family rather than go out with team-mates on the rare occasions they partied. Nobody minded that when Torres was doing well on the pitch, but it became another thing to get frustrated by when results turned the other way.

Indeed, Carragher believes Hodgson did not drop Torres that autumn only because he had no choice considering his only back-up was David N’Gog.
 
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
 
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I'd like to know what the full story was on his exit, he's alluded to dropping the dirt on it a few times. It was made out at the time by the club for it to be a last minute thing and he'd stitched us up, but there was also talk that we'd been talking to Chelski for months about getting rid of him. Even in that last season for us when he was broken and allegedly didn't want to play for us, he was still banging them in 1 in 2. He was never the same after he left, same as Owen and Fowler.
Not sure if he's a cunt or not, but he was fucking awesome.
 
Interesting read, in hindsight the club was toxic at the time and given the way we had cashed in Alonso and Mascherano it seemed inevitable Torres would be next to go. I dont blame him, he was an incredible player for us and I dont think he deserves alot of the stick he gets.

There were times watching him and Gerrard play together that were just electric. You knew we didnt have the best team in the world but if those two could get on the ball anything was possible.
 
Watching the Gerrard make us dream documentary, he really did feel alone after Torres left and contemplated joining Jose at Chelsea/Inter.

Not sure this club would be where it is today had he left as well although we've had a lot of rebuilding etc since he's hung them up.

Stevie & Torres is still the best partnership duo I've seen at LFC.
 
I forgive him. There were some dodgy characters around at the time, and he was with us for almost four years. One of the best players in the world - not from liverpool, and had already served his time with his passion club at Atletico - it's hard to see him not thinking he deserved better than commoli, hodgson and purslow.

He did down tools. And it seems like they did want to sell him. Case closed for me.

But that Mickey Owen, he can go and...
 
If we had Torres and Suarez instead of that donkey Carroll...we would have won the league ages ago.....it doesn't matter who the manager is with that kind of fire power upfront.
 
If we had Torres and Suarez instead of that donkey Carroll...we would have won the league ages ago.....it doesn't matter who the manager is with that kind of fire power upfront.

I saw them play in a charity game at Anfield together for Gerrard’s foundation, and it was electric even then, if only.
 
I think this Torres insight shows that we cant get by on keeping players who never grew up supporting Liverpool by selling them the magic of Liverpool and "this means more" and all that. If we want to keep players happy we have to really look after them 360 wise. Right now with Klopp in charge it feels like the club is pulling in the right direction and doing that, we seem organized and we seem to really care about our players behind the scenes.
 
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