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.
