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 mercilessly cut off with a 4-0 defeat.
Fernando Torres, of course, got the first goal that night. He may
have committed 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 example 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 what still remains 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, Zenden, and
Riera manned the wings – hardworking, canny, sometimes classy, and fondly remembered by the fans, 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 (#6 in video).
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 in harmony 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, Sami Hyypiä, Michael Owen, and treble-winning seasons. 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 and firmly. 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 (#2 in the video, although of course I encourage you to watch all ten). The cheeky clearance from Xabi Alonso from inside Liverpool's half sees both Torres and Gerrard around the center
circle, facing each other, Gerrard looking not 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 fifteen yards in the opposite
directions, stretching the Newcastle backline and creating the perfect opening for Torres to run into. Gerrard knocks a left foot pass, a weak 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 Torres's Artemis, just
as it caught up to Steven Gerrard's Apollo 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, operating in a dynamic, ever-changing reality, who can 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, your team, and your fans are having fun together on the football pitch, you
are probably 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.
©Tanmay Viraj Tikekar
March 22, 2024
Pune, MH
