Football fandom is definitely a strange beast. Luis Suárez is easily one of my favourite players to ever play for the club, such was the magic in his feet. I felt like an 8 year-old watching John Barnes and Peter Beardsley all over again when he was here. Yet he caused mayhem when he refused to shake Patrice Evra’s hand despite apparently having told his manager that he would, left a club legend twisting in the wind trying to handle a mess that may have gone some way towards costing him his job, unleashed more chaos when he went to bite Branislav Ivanović, then went public trying to force a move to a rival who, somehow, from some source or other, were under the impression that he had a release clause in his contract of £40m.
And then it comes to Fernando Torres who was here for almost exactly the same amount of time (3 and a half years for both of them) and scored 81 goals in 142 games across all competitions for a ratio of a goal every 1.75 games, not too dissimilar to Suárez’s record of 82 in 133 or a goal every 1.6 games. More importantly he never bit anyone, never became embroiled in an unsavoury row with an opponent, never gave the finger to opposition fans or embarrassed the club in any way, linked up so memorably with Steven Gerrard, scored some superb goals and when it came time to leave for a rival, he at least did so behind closed doors. And yet despite otherwise being a sane human being, my memories of Suárez are somehow better, which absolutely shames my rational self if I'm being honest.
I’m not sure what Torres wishes to achieve by rehashing the story of how he left the club, if he was just asked to be interviewed for a book and agreed or whether he wants to position himself better in the minds of Liverpool supporters. If the latter is his aim, then I’d remind him that football fans are simple creatures. All they care about is their club, and their relationship with players, even good ones, can be extremely complicated. Eric Meijer is probably better thought-of than Michael Owen despite achieving less than a thousandth of what Owen did at the club, largely because he went on the piss with the fans on a few occasions. And Suárez is still idolised by many supporters despite everything outlined in the opening paragraph of this post.
I think the best thing for Torres to do would be to grab a hold of the following words, which were pointless and stupid even as they left his mouth: “The target for every footballer is to play at one of the top level clubs in the world, and I can do that now, so I am very very happy.” Grab hold of them in his hand, position them at his lips and suck them back down his throat so that he never said them. But he can’t, which is a shame, more for us than for him in fairness because we like our memories and the Torres ones are tainted. Him? He’s a millionaire living in his beautiful hometown whose move away from Anfield guaranteed him the medals he craved. He has his priorities and we have ours, and never the twain shall meet.
Why anyone would consider this an interesting story is beyond me, but each to his or her own I suppose.
