Re: Torres - Chelsea 35mil Bid turned down
No sign of Dantes. I hope Torres has good security. Kind of.
No sign of Dantes. I hope Torres has good security. Kind of.
The 26 year-old striker has stunned Liverpool by following up his verbal request to leave Anfield — delivered on Thursday — with a formal plea to leave. Initially Torres asked for Liverpool to at least negotiate with Chelsea. But his resolve has hardened in the last 48 hours and he wants to leave now.
Liverpool are adamant that Torres is not for sale and manager Kenny Dalglish has already told the player and the club’s owners that he will not agree to any deal.
Liverpool will have to respond on Saturday as they try to defuse the crisis that has enveloped the club and with Chelsea already set to submit a revised offer for the Spanish international.
It is understood that the Premier League champions want to offer striker Daniel Sturridge as part of an increased bid. A formal offer of £28 million was rejected two days ago and Chelsea have already intimated they will raise that to more than £30 million with Sturridge as a makeweight to take it closer to Liverpool’s expected valuation of £50 million for Torres.
Liverpool boss Kenny Dalglish does not want to be the man who lets Torres leave Anfield, but despite their defiant statement, the signs are that Liverpool’s board will sanction the move if Chelsea offer £45million, plus striker Daniel Sturridge.
The development rocked Anfield on a day when the club broke their transfer record by spending £22.8m on Ajax striker Luis Suarez. Torres has been left disillusioned by broken promises made to keep him at the club last summer.
Chelsea are aware of his restlessness and of a verbal agreement with Liverpool’s previous regime that he would be allowed to move on if a reasonable bid was received.
Abramovich made a £28m offer last week and increased it to £35m on Thursday, with the news breaking conveniently just as Liverpool players, already out of the FA Cup, were embarking on a two-day break.
Chelsea will return with a third offer before Monday’s deadline, with Sturridge included in part exchange.
There is a tipping point in the relationship between every famous player and his club at which the latter have to stop wasting their energy in new ways to appease him and instead get him out the door for the best possible price. Liverpool have reached that point with Fernando Torres.
No shame in that. Manchester United found themselves in the same position with Cristiano Ronaldo; Arsenal eventually agreed to part with Thierry Henry and there came a point when Tottenham Hotspur accepted an offer for Dimitar Berbatov. In all three cases the clubs cajoled and negotiated with their star names, but only up to a point.
Torres has demonstrated this season that he has little appetite for helping Liverpool extricate themselves from the mess that they find themselves in. The appointment of Kenny Dalglish as manager has embarrassed him into a slightly improved level of effort but that is relative to his woefully lacklustre performances under Roy Hodgson.
The memory that will stand out for me of Torres' last season at Liverpool – if this is what it turns out to be – will be the moment against Everton in October when Jamie Carragher roared at Torres for a pass that fell short. Torres put his finger to his lips to shush Carragher.
There can be little doubt that it was Torres' preference to join Chelsea in the summer and when that was denied to him he was never the same. Hodgson generously pondered in public what was wrong with his centre-forward when it seemed obvious that Torres was sulking. Little surprise that his best performance this season was against Chelsea.
Torres' time was nice while it lasted. But £35m for a 26-year-old who has had barely a handful of decent games all season and was overshadowed at the World Cup finals last year is a good deal – however painful it might feel to Liverpool today.
As a public relations exercise, selling your marquee name to a rival is always difficult to pull off. It requires decisive leadership and the unwavering belief that you have the right transfer strategy. Of course, Liverpool have done it once before. In 1977 they sold Kevin Keegan, then arguably Europe's best striker, to Hamburg. The young man who came from Celtic to replace him, as most fans can tell you, did not do too badly.