The Doomed Twins: When Heaven and Earth Trembled before the Might of Liverpool’s Apollo and Artemis

A lot of Liverpool fans of my age first got into Liverpool fandom on the back of Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard, who, in the late 2000s, were threatening to drag Liverpool Football Club back to its historic perch.

In the end, that wasn't to happen, but it was, for a lot of us, the last time we saw our club bare its claws and frighten one and all in the game. It was a time when Real Madrid - yes, the same Real Madrid who seem to beat us every time we play them these days - hung its head at Anfield and had it mercifully cut off 4-0.

Fernando Torres, of course, got the first goal that night. It may have been a foul on Pepe, purely in legal terms, but even 15 years later, it sure looks like the Real Madrid defense was terrified of this kid - El Niño - from Atletico.

The ball from Carragher is nothing more than a rugby punt forward, a nothing ball in a nothing area, almost confusing considering he is not under any real pressure in his own half. But, just like Nemanja Vidic would do a few days later, the Madrid defense allow the ball to bounce. Fabio Cannavaro has won the last world cup as captain, but it looks like he rushes back into position too fast, far faster than his feet can handle, because the knowledge that Fernando Torres is lurking behind his shoulder terrifies him. His wild swipe is easily evaded - he barely even connects with the ball. Pepe is dragged to the floor inside the Madrid penalty area and his hurried clearance intercepted, Dirk Kuyt taps it into the six yard box, and El Niño is there to stroke it home into the almost empty net. 

Coming on March 10, 2009, just ten days before Torres's 25th birthday, this 4-0 win at home was immediately followed by a 4-1 win away at Old Trafford, home of hated rivals and league frontrunners Manchester United, and a 5-1 home win over Aston Villa, who would eventually finish sixth that season on the back of a stellar roster and Martin O'Neill's canny man management. As scintillating as this run was, in hindsight, this rampant three-game winning run turned out to be that Liverpool team's peak, with Xabi Alonso's sale to Madrid in the summer of 2009 proving to be the first of a long line of self-imposed adversities for the club in the first half of the 2010s. It really was the perfect microcosm of Liverpool's very best under Rafa Benitez.

Benitez had a very clear vision for how he wanted Liverpool to play when he came to England. It seemed like Mourinho had just birthed the blueprint that so many coaches would later use to beat possession-hogging, technically talented teams, but Rafael Benitez had been doing pretty much the same thing with Valencia while winning La Liga with the last non-big-three team to win the title in Spain. He wanted to win the ball back in midfield, he wanted disciplined, hardworking wingers who would track back diligently for 90 minutes and more, tough, tight-marking defenders in a low block, a narrow defensive shape, and a willingness to run behind the opposition's defense on the counter.

Benitez jumped on the opportunity to sign Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano, creating the perfect engine room for Steven Gerrard to gallop forward from his quasi-number-ten role. Diverse wingers like Kuyt, Benayoun, Pennant, Babel, and Riera manned the wings – hardworking, canny, sometimes classy, but always a bit limited, and never a consistent goal threat. 

Fernando Torres became the crown jewel of this intricate piece almost from his first appearance for Liverpool. His first goal for the club came in just his second Premier League game, with the striker converting a pinpoint Steven Gerrard pass with powers that would come to mark his entire three-year stay with Liverpool – the confidence to take the ball on the run and initiate the next sequence without waiting for a second touch, the short burst of speed to get away from the defender, the robust physicality making defenders hesitant to commit to a tackle, and brutishly cold finishing ability from almost any angle.

Tal Ben Haim may not be a hall-of-famer among Premier League defenders, but Torres doesn't need a second touch to know that this one is there for the taking. He takes one touch on the run to steady the pass from Gerrard, the second takes him away from the dismayed Ben Haim and into the eighteen yard box. He is at an angle, facing Petr Cech, possibly the best Premier League keeper at the time. But he seems to have adjudged his run to perfection. Just as Cech starts to come out to close down the angle, Torres finds an open route to the far corner on the keeper's left, and slots it in with a smooth swish of his right foot. The kid has arrived. 

For most of his time at Liverpool, Torres just seemed a cut above the rest. His collar out, long sleeves and long blonde hair fluttering in the wind, he moved with a quiet confidence, completely in tune with his own body and with those few minds who could keep up with his. A god among men, happy to impose his heavenly rules on the trembling, quivering mortals around him.

It would be easy to overlook this in the modern era of the hyperathlete ushered in by Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, but the 24 league goals Fernando Torres scored in the 2007-08 season was a league record at the time for a foreign player playing his first season in England. 

Not enough, you say? Here's more: Torres became the first Liverpool player since Robbie Fowler in 1995-96 to score more than 20 league goals in a season, scored more goals (in all competitions) than Michael Owen ever managed in a single season, equalled Liverpool legend Roger Hunt's record of scoring in eight consecutive home league games, and finished second in the league's goalscoring charts for the season, all of this in his debut season for Liverpool, and his first outside the extremely familiar environs of Madrid, having grown up in the city and risen through the ranks at Atletico Madrid. 

In the heavily injury-ridden 2008-09 season, he scored 14 league goals in just 24 appearances - an extremely admirable ratio in the era when Ronaldo and Messi hadn't yet fooled us into thinking that 50-goal seasons were the norm. Lest we forget, he was just 23 years old when he signed for Liverpool.

His partnership with Steven Gerrard is the stuff of legends, and rightly so, because in Fernando Torres, Gerrard had found what he had lacked since the days of Michael Owen - a playmate capable of matching him blow for blow. A teammate who could not only remain on the same wavelength as Gerrard mentally, but one who could also match his prodigious physicality. In the wiry, lithe, long-haired lad from Spain, the powder keg of Steven Gerrard had found the perfect fuse to blow things up with. Steven Gerrard’s Apollo had found his Artemis.

Steven Gerrard had been heralded as a leader and the future club captain since before his debut for Liverpool, and he had already proven with his performances in the 2005 Champions League Final and the 2006 FA Cup Final that he was fully up to the task of leading this storied club to new heights. Stevie was the leader, the captain, the guardian, the lawgiver, the pathfinder. As the ancient Greeks called Apollo "agyieus", meaning protector / defender, so Kopites relied on their captain fantastic to see their team through. But Stevie couldn't do it all by himself. 

Stevie had been on his own since the heady Y2K days of Gary McAllister, Danny Murphy, Robbie Fowler, and Michael Owen. Strikers like Djibril Cisse, Peter Crouch, Milan Baros, and Florent Sinama Pongolle certainly weren't duds, but none were capable of matching Stevie in his effort, talent, and execution. With Torres’s arrival, in the summer of 2007, there was finally someone who Stevie could join hands with, cry “havoc”, and let slip the dogs of war.

There was something divine about Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres, that’s for sure. They seemed born to play together, Gerrard’s powerful but metronomic drumming providing the perfect foundation for Torres’s wailing guitar solos. It was heavy metal football, years before Klopp would popularize the phrase in the early 2010s.The pitch always seemed smaller, the other players lesser, when Liverpool’s number 8 and number 9 strode into the fray. They went about their business quietly but firmly, like polite, sophisticated assassins who would do nothing to you except slitting your throat so expertly that you don’t even realize it until the blood starts to gush out. There was nothing brash about the way they played. Nothing loud. Nothing arrogant. Honestly, they didn’t even speak to each other that much on the football pitch. They didn’t need to.

This is a feature of many reputed footballing duos, but Gerrard’s passes always seemed to have that something more that Torres could exploit. He didn’t just hand over the ball to El Niño. He sent the ball over with magic already whispered into it. He gave it to him on the run – always on the run. Always a little bit to one side, instructing, or maybe aiding, Torres in going past his defender on that side.

They seemed to move as one, opposite but complementary, like the roots and shoots of the same germinating seed. They seemed to share one heartbeat, not even needing to see each other for one to know where the other was. From the summer of 2007 to the summer of 2009, Liverpool’s home ground Anfield was illuminated by these deadly, destructive, divine twins just as much as its monstrous floodlights illuminated them. 

I could wax on about this particular goal ad infinitum, but seriously, watch Torres's goal against Newcastle at Anfield in the Premier League in the 2007-08 season. The cheeky clearance from Xabi Alonso from inside Liverpool's half sees both Torres and Gerrard in and around the center circle, facing each other, Gerrard not looking at the ball but at his teammate to see where the ball was going to land, scanning their territory together in perfect harmony. Torres nods the ball down to Gerrard and takes off to Liverpool's right  hand side around his man marker. As if acting on the same impulse, Gerrard plays the ball into the left hand side with his first touch. Barely a second later, Gerrard and Torres have both moved twenty yards in the opposite directions, stretched the Newcastle backline, and created the perfect opening behind the Newcastle defense. Gerrard knocks a left foot pass, a left foot pass, mind you, fifty feet into Torres's path, and it looks like a simple tap-in for the boy from Spain. But lo and behold, what's this? Torres doesn’t take a touch. He lets the ball run, in true appreciation of the weight on the ball from Gerrard. The keeper, expecting El Niño to go for the finish straight away, dives at his feet and is evaded. Torres, who, remember, has still not touched Gerrard’s pass, goes round the fallen keeper, and then slots it into the Newcastle net expertly through desperate retreating defenders. A true vintage goal, it was the zenith of the Torres-Gerrard partnership. 

Some psychic connection, some fault in the stars, definitely existed between the two. Possibly it was that same divine providence that robbed Torres of his inexhaustible self-belief seemingly the moment he signed for Chelsea, some higher power reacting with a thumbs down emoji to the shocking move.

It was a shocking downfall, from being an inspiration for club and country to becoming a lost, rejected, clueless idiot wandering around the football pitch not because he really wanted to be there, but because he was getting paid to be there. Perhaps it was Hera’s wrath finally catching up to him, just as it caught up to Steven Gerrard in the form of that inevitable, cruel slip at the back end of the 2013-14 season. It seems as good an explanation as any. Liverpool fans certainly have just cause to hate Fernando for the way he left. But at the same time, and perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, it is important to remember what he was at Liverpool.

Many people see football as an idiot’s game, a brainless pursuit for jocks whose legs work faster than their minds. Some sad souls even see football as nothing more than a TV show, a commercial milking cow to be exploited to its full. But really, football is just like any other human endeavor – a pursuit of perfection orchestrated by imperfect individuals who can, given the right circumstances, come together to produce moments of breath-taking brilliance, even magic. As in life, there are moments in football when the Gods do seem to be watching … and perhaps surreptitiously fiddling with the events to suit their fickle wants and needs. Fernando Torres was a blessed child at Liverpool – a pure, chaste, merciless hunter. He didn’t score for the money. He didn’t score for the records. He scored because it seemed to be the only purpose of his existence, his raison d’etre. He scored because it made him happy. He scored because it was fun.

You can propound footballing theories and pursue footballing philosophies all you want, but if you are having fun on a football pitch, you are doing something right. Oftentimes, if you are having fun on a football pitch, that is all that really matters.

Fernando Torres was not doing much more than that at Liverpool. At Liverpool, Fernando Torres was just having fun.

Dystopia: the state of having leaned over too much

Bozo Boozo was too stunned by the sight that met his eyes. In spite of the loud thump that had woken him up at the wheel, he could see nothing in front of the car. He got out and closed the door with a loud whump, and then instantly regretted it when the side mirror shook threateningly upon its one remaining hinge. The one remaining hinge was becoming less reliable by the minute and was clearly on the verge of breaking off.

He walked over to the front, trying his best to regulate his breaths. He failed spectacularly in this endeavor in spite of the visual assurance of seeing no one in front of his car, as the more disturbing possibility of something being under his car had just occurred to him.

As it transpired, there was something under his car. He had hit a road sign asking drivers to “Drive Safe”.

He extracted the sign from under his car and examined his car. The bumper was a bit scratched, but the budget-oriented nature of the sign meant that it hadn’t been able to do much damage. The budget-oriented nature of the sign also meant that Bozo, a very much midlife-crisis-plagued man, could easily straighten it out.

Bozo made to throw it away and then saw that the budget-conscious government had painted another message on the back of it. The message on the other side read “Sign Not in Use”. In fact, what Bozo thought was the back of the sign was its front. The road security agency had installed a sign at that spot since it had had strict directives to maintain a sign/5 km ratio on the highways. Someone had pointed out that the sign was blank, upon which the agency had painted “Sign Not in Use” upon it – the only message that seemed to make sense for a sign installed in the middle of nowhere. When the self-defeating irony of the message had been pointed out, the agency had proceeded to simply turn the sign around and paint an equally meaningless message on the other side.

The rather literal bureaucratic interpretation of the sign/5 km directive had also resulted in several signs that warned drivers of speed bumps that they had passed a few kilometers back (less than 5 kilometers, of course), the imminent presence of narrow bridges where there weren’t any, and the start of a mountain road just as the road started to descend. The road safety agency had even moved the location of several – 3 at the last count – toll booths so that they could coincide with their signs.

Having ascertained that the road sign was the only object he had hit in his slumberous drive, Bozo finally managed to get his breath under control. He then compulsively smoothed his sleeve and rolled it above his wrist, over which it had compulsively drooped. He always wore perfectly tailored clothes, but somehow they didn’t always seem to be perfectly tailored for him.

Having thrown away the sign in the shrubbery at the side of the road, thus inadvertently setting off a process that would result in at least three road safety agency meetings and the sacking of one supervisor, Bozo got back into the car and sank into the driver’s seat.

He had fallen asleep at the wheel and that was not okay. He had to make sure it didn't happen again. He closed his eyes for a while and did a meditation trick an old girlfriend had taught him. Then he remembered that she had left him for his brother, and this woke him up better than anything else could have.

He turned on his car radio and cranked up the volume. He shut the door with an unusually vigorous swing and turned on the engine. As he drove back on to the road, he glanced at the side mirror and realized that the mirror had finally come off, because of which he hadn’t seen that the road safety agency's pickup truck was already crashing into the side of his car.

***

The road safety agency rep was on his way to replace the sign with one that said “Sign Now in Use”. He had been driving the pickup for hours and in the budget-conscious pickup with no air-conditioning, this was turning out to be surprisingly soporific. Apart from being awake, there was nothing he could have done when the sloppily driven sedan had swerved suddenly into his path.

3 Ways to Fit in a Daily Dose of Reading

Reading is a pastime for a privileged few who think it's okay to refer to themselves as the privileged few. While most take up books as a last resort, these privileged few (nobody objects if I keep using the term, right? No? Good!) start to rot without one. They turn to their mobile phones in desperation and usually fail to find in the virtual world the company they desire. They turn to their TV screens and manage to pass a while, but eventually crave the lignin-infused company of a book.

In spite of their dreams of leading a life filled with books at every step in a house filled with books with someone who shares this fantasy, routine life interrupts harshly. Finding time to read amidst the daily rush can then become a chore itself. Here's the three best ways you can fit in a bout of reading in the grind of the modern 9-6 life.

The Lunch Break

If you work in a place with a lunch break smaller than an hour, my sympathies are with you. Luckily most of us don't and have an uninterrupted block of time in the afternoon. While I'm not advocating abandoning lunch - well, not just advocating abandoning lunch - it's the easiest thing in the world to read while you eat. Unless you need company while you eat, in which case you're probably wasting more of the lunch break than you need to.

Be bold enough to use the overachiever's privilege to extend your lunch breaks beyond the allotted amount. But maintain the fine line between being an overachiever deserving a bit of laxity and an inefficient break-hogger. Oh, and make sure you overachieve.

The Waits of Modern Life

Unless you have ordered some really fast food, you probably have to wait up to 15 minutes for takeaways. Unless you are married or live with your parents, you probably have to order takeaways more than once a week. This can add up to half an hour of reading time. Add in other places that have lines, and you can extract a couple hours of reading time per week without breaking a sweat.

If you use public transport for your commutes, you probably get around an hour every day. Instead of looking out the window at scenes you see everyday, dive into your paper-backed companion. Even if you don't get a seat, reading while standing is not as hard as we may imagine. Give it a go.

The Game of the Throne

If you suffer from constipation, it may be hard to find a silver lining. But if you are a reader and constipated, you've discovered the key to making the best out of something that literally forces you to sit motionless for a considerable time. Grab a book and at least the problem of boredom is eliminated! The other one, well, I could perhaps recommend a good thriller to shock your systems into action...

Read a book instead of watching the same illegally downloaded shows over and over again. Instead of torturing your mind with soap operas. Instead of torturing your eyes with video games. Grab a book any time you can, in any filler, any pause. I promise, you won't regret it.

When Will You Go?

Tomorrow. Next month. Next Year. After I finish my education. After I become sure I am making the right decision. After I save a respectable amount of money. After I get married. After my kids go to school. After my kids get married. After I overcome the high blood pressure. After I retire. Right after I manage to stand on my own today and pee in less than a minute.

Whoa whoa whoa, back up, there!

Procrastination is the world's favorite hobby. It is free, it is convenient, it is ridiculously easy. When it comes to travel, we come up with all sorts of funny excuses. A big part of the reason though, one which we don't like to reveal, is that most of us don't actually want to travel. We just want to want to travel.

We secretly live the life of the tea seller in Paulo Coelho's Alchemist, dreaming of visiting Mecca but cringing from the idea of actually getting off his ass. We know that wanting to travel the world is a lot less expensive, lot easier, and a lot more romantic than traveling the world. And when most of the rest of the world has already bought into that secret, it is a lot easier to fall prey to the lure of whining about your unfulfilled dreams with fellow average Joes.

If you want to travel, you must realize that your reasons for not wanting to travel right now will still apply a year from now. Not just that, there will be even more terrifying demons to slay.

You say you have student loans? Just wait till you have to deal with mortgage.

You say you have commitments? Just wait till you get married.

You say you have no money? Just wait till you have children.

We worry about waiting till we are certain we are making the right choice. We worry about being mugged in unfamiliar locations. We worry about being stranded in a jungle with no coverage on your cellphone. We worry about getting lost.

Guess what, you can get lost, stranded, or mugged just as easily in your home town. You can run out of money just as easily, sometimes more so, in your current life. You can make bad decisions in your life all the time regardless of where you are. So hey, at least you got that going on for you. 

If you don't want to travel, you will always find a reason to not leave it all behind and get out on the road. Like the mythical Hydra, There will always be bills to pay, weddings to attend, bonds to maintain, and excuses to nurture. And just as you think you have cut one off, new ones will have already sprung to action in its place.

Tomorrows are nothing but a fickle mire of uncertainty. Tomorrows will always remain tantalizingly beyond the horizon. Until one day, like the ever-absent roll of toilet paper in public bathrooms, you run out of tomorrows just when you need them the most. You can never start traveling on a tomorrow; the day you get going is always a today. Unless you are Matthew McConaughey in a Tesseract constructed by 5-dimensional humans of the future; then you can get going on a tomorrow. But until then, rely on your supply of todays. They never run out.

There is never a perfect time to travel. The best thing about traveling, though, is it doesn't need one!

A Day in Bijapur

The first thing you notice while traveling from Maharashtra to Karnataka is that the buses are much less deadly in the latter. And the roads smoother. And the scenery nicer. And the fuel prices lower. But I digress.

I rolled into Bijapur around noon, and booked a room in Santosh lodge, opposite the bus station. The rooms are clean but cramped and there's no generator backup, but a room w/o TV is a good deal at 250 Rs/night (300 w/ TV).

In the evening I went out to see Ibrahim Roja and the surrounding monuments. Visited the Jod Gumbaz (twin domes) and the Taj bawdi on the way. The latter was a stinking mess of filth. To put it mildly. Once used as drinking water to all of Medieval Bijapur, the bawdi (well) is now filled with slimy, murky water and chocked with trash. The Jod gumbaz is much better maintained but is used more as a picnic spot thanks to its surrounding lawns.

The Ibrahim Roja ('Roja' means the tomb of a male Muslim) is befitting of the status afforded by the Archaeological Survey of India. It consists of the Roja on the left and a mosque on the right, surrounded by lawns. Situated outside Bijapur's city fortifications, the Roja was built by Ibrahim Adilshah as a would-be tomb for his then-living wife. Building a tomb for a living wife was considered a display of love back then but times have changed; do not try this at home. As fate would have it, Ibrahim passed away before his Begum and became the first occupant of the monument.

Ibrahim Roja

The Ibrahim Roja

The passage down memory lane...

On my way back I paid a visit to the Malik-e-Maidan (meaning 'master of the battlefield' and known in Maharashtra as 'Mulukh Maidan') cannon. 14 ft long and about 5 ft wide (it almost reaches my shoulder!), this 55-ton leviathan was originally used by the Bahmani army against the forces of Vijayanagara at the battle of Talikote. It was brought to Bijapur by 10 elephants and many oxen and men. Its mouth is engraved with a crocodile crushing an elephant in its jaws, representing the Shah's victory over the south Indian Hindu kings.

The fearsome Malik-e-Maidan

Saba-Dome Gigante!

Legs crying out for a breather and hunger starting to rear its head, I returned to my room after satisfying the latter with some jalebi and a plate of delicious roadside chicken.