PAUL HAYWARD watched as Fernando Torres returned to Madrid with more of a puff than a bang
TO THE outside eye, Fernando Torres was born on the wrong side of the tracks. By posting his allegiance to the less celebrated inhabitants of the Vicente Calderon Stadium on the banks of the Rio Manzanares, El Nino turned his back on the opportunity to join the great Real Madrid goalscoring lineage of Di Stefano, Puskas, Hugo Sanchez and now Raul.
Torres would have looked a picture in the crisp white of the King’s club but his boyhood love was for Atletico, who trail Real 9-0 on the list of European titles won. To swoon for Atletico in the city where the world’s most illustrious club parade their majesty must have felt like walking past the Prado to take in the pavement art outside the train station.
Fortunately, though, success is not the only force to which the human heart responds, and Torres was to become to Atletico what Raul is to Real: a Madrileno sent down from the stands to the pitch as an emissary of the people. By 19, he was captaining the Manchester City or Everton of Madrid and vowing that he could never ride 30 minutes north to play for the club Barcelona call “the white enemy”.
But he still came to the Bernabeu for a big night out, in a Liverpool shirt, as two of Europe’s superpowers rattled their jewellery at one another for only the second time in the competition’s history. The first was in May 1981, when Alan Kennedy’s 82nd-minute goal settled the battle of the tight shorts at the Parc des Princes in Paris.
Injury denied Torres a homecoming to the Vicente Calderon when Liverpool met Atletico in the group stage but the draw for the first knock-out round served up ample compensation with this chance to “make lots of Atletico fans happy” as he observed in the build-up. Before the kick-off, Liverpool’s record signing went down on his haunches on the half-way line and stared at the ranks of white like a skier studying an arrangement of slalom poles.
No Steven Gerrard in the starting line-up, but all 6ft 1in of Torres was on duty to provide a youthful counterpoint to Raul, the soul of 21st century Madrid, and to provide world-class, match-altering talent to a side who rely too often on two sources of such brilliance: their stringy, gliding Spanish centre-forward and the marauding, eager captain whose torn hamstring failed to heal in time for him to be risked from the start.
When Torres arrived in England to break Ruud van Nistelrooy’s first-season scoring record by a foreign player the sages worried that he was too much of a choirboy to cope with the demonic physicality of the Premier League. Forty-two goals in 71 games have settled that argument, though his hamstring trouble has made him seem less dependable this season, or at least more fragile.
If Torres was the red rag and Real the bull, we saw the devil in him in the fourth minute when he clipped the heels of Pepe, the Madrid centre-half, and ignored the referee’s whistle to chip an idle shot into the Ultras behind Iker Casillas’s goal. The crowd’s response was predictably fruity.
Raul’s favoured method of ghosting off the forward line into the number 10 position to create fresh angles ran into the joint screening operation of Javier Mascherano and Xabi Alonso, and while Real could claim the greater share of first-half possession, a 10th consecutive victory in all competitions hardly seemed inevitable as Liverpool coped well without the free-running Gerrard.
Intimations of Torres’s own frailty appeared when a first-half bang to the foot sent him to the touchline for treatment and Ryan Babel stripped for action, but he lasted just over an hour before Babel came on.
How Liverpool need Torres to be fully sound and knock over a few teams now that they have won only five of their last 13 games back home, and are fast surrendering their best chance since 2002 of regaining the English title, which they last held 19 years ago.
That mission assumes higher rank for most Liverpool supporters, especially in the year of the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, than another melodramatic European campaign, but it is hard to resist a clash of two clubs who have won 14 European Cups between them. For Torres this tie blends the epic and the personal.
- Guardian Service
