“When I was a boy, I was really thin, small, long-haired,” he says. “I always looked young. People thought, he can’t play football. I used that to my advantage. In the first season when I arrived here [in England], it is true that maybe 80 per cent of the players in the Premier League didn’t know me, so I could use the way I look. It was easier for me because they didn’t know what I can do. They think maybe they can bully me.”
On a football field, Torres is no shrinking violet. At 6ft 1in, he terrifies opponents with his speed and physicality. The Liverpool fans soon spotted he was a lot more than he seemed. Within days of his arrival the Torres song was echoing around Anfield’s Kop, the stand that had once rung to the praise of Kevin Keegan, Kenny Dalglish and Robbie Fowler.
“It is incredible,” he says of the chant. “I can understand why the fans would sing [his colleague] Stevie Gerrard’s name, because he is from here. But now a player comes from another country and gets this? It’s amazing to get this. Each player has one place in the world where he is happy and as a result he plays well. My place is Anfield. Every game I can play there I feel good.”
Torres’s journey to Merseyside is one he never expected to make. “As a kid I never once dreamt of playing for Liverpool,” he says. “I always live in the present. I never dream about what might happen. Why? It might not.”
“If I can touch the cup it will be the best moment for a footballer. After that you cannot do anything better,” he says.
“But there is high expectation for us, and that is not always the best for you, that pressure. I think you have one chance in your life to win the World Cup and maybe this is our chance. We have good players, playing well together, who have been together for three, four years. If we miss this chance, this may be it. The pressure is very big.”
Liverpool paid £23 million for his services, a fee which, when you consider that Joleon Lescott and Dimitar Berbatov have changed hands for far more, represents the bargain of the footballing century. Torres came to Liverpool, he says, because of the Spanish connection: the manager, Rafa Benitez, another Madrileño, spoke persuasively to him in his mother tongue. (Nine other squad players and six members of the backroom staff also spoke Spanish as a first language.) Which was just as well, as Torres didn’t speak any English at all.
“Not a word,” he says. “The first month, that was really difficult. When Jamie [Carragher, Liverpool’s vice captain, and another home-grown talisman] spoke to me I didn’t realise he was speaking English. Even now, when two Scouse people are talking between themselves it is difficult to follow. I know some Liverpool words, but this is not the right place to say them. People say to me sometimes, “You have a Scouse accent”, but when I go to a different place it may be strange for them, so I try to speak proper English. But I have a few words. “Deffo”, I like that.”
His English is rapidly improving. And his sharp eyes suggest he misses nothing. “My mother says to me, ‘I see you in press conference yesterday speaking English, and you are very good.’ That’s because she doesn’t speak English. I remember before I came to England watching Rafa Nadal or Fernando Alonso and thinking they were brilliant, but that was because I understand nothing. Now I can tell they speak like me: not very good.”
Despite the advances in his English – encouraged by the fact that Benitez insists that it should be the lingua franca of the Anfield dressing-room – he still finds occasional cause to retreat into Spanish.
“Sometimes I speak it as a code,’ he says. ‘If me and Albert [Riera, his team and international colleague] want to discuss a move on the pitch, we will speak in Spanish so the opposition fullback doesn’t understand us. It works for us because so far we have not come across an English fullback who speaks Spanish.”
Liverpool striker Fernando Torres insists he will remain committed to his Reds contract.Torres has been linked with a summer move to Manchester City, which had a £70 million offer for him turned down by manager Rafa Benitez earlier this year.
In Liverpool, he believes, there is far less critical analysis, the press is more forgiving, the supporters less intrusive. “Scouse people are very respectful,” he says. “If they see me walking my dogs in the park, they say, ‘A’right Nando, lad.’ And that is all. I like that.”
“I try to keep my private life apart,” he says. “I try to live as normal a life as possible, because I am normal. I was born in a working-class place in Spain, my father worked every day of his life and I don’t like to be a big-head, or go to parties or events, or be seen about. I don’t like people talking about me. I prefer no one talks about me. I prefer to be at home playing PlayStation and being calm.”
He likes it because the evidence would suggest he is not someone who courts publicity. For instance, when he and Olalla married last summer, they did so in a ceremony in a town hall in a Madrid suburb to which only two guests were invited. And neither of them was a photographer from Hello! magazine. Many footballers would regard that as a seriously wasted earning opportunity.
This is the extraordinary thing about Torres: he masks his genius beneath a carapace of total ordinariness. There is nothing exceptional about him off the pitch, he insists. For him, life is about football, family and an occasional five-hour session of Fifa 2010. But then a cynic might suggest that maybe he has no pressing financial need to put himself in the public gaze or to engage with the myriad commercial endorsements of the modern game, given that when he signed for Liverpool he was the highest-paid player in the country, pocketing a cheery £5m a year. So what does a young man spend all that money on?
“I don’t like people when they are famous or rich changing their lifestyle, so I try to be the same person as I always was,” he says.
“I don’t like to buy flash cars or flash clothes. For me, the best thing is to keep with the people you knew back when you were not famous. You meet so many people who try to get you to go to parties, or to photograph you in flash places, to distract you from your goals.”
When he leaves, after assiduously shaking hands with everyone from make-up lady to camera assistant, he heads off back home in an Audi 4×4, a car that, for the most coveted man in the most well-rewarded football league in the world, really does count as not very flash at all.
And yet, in another contradiction at the heart of Torres, for a man who says he does not like to be the centre of attention, he appears to enjoy posing for the pictures, naturally knowing how to hold a camera’s gaze.
“It is OK,” he says of his role as a model. “But it is not my job. And I don’t do anything that stops me from my job: being a footballer. It’s not so hard for me now because I can control almost everything. I have experience and I know which is the route to follow. But when I was 17 and first in the [Atlético] team, then there was a different way.”
“Of people who want to know you, be your friend, take you to places that maybe it is best you don’t go. And if you follow that path maybe your career is over before you started. So I am really happy that I didn’t do that, but I could keep my friends and the important people around me. And now I’m 25 and playing for the best team in the world.”
He makes it sound as if he has been fully absorbed into the Liverpool way. “Yes, when I go back to Spain I look the wrong way in traffic. I had a problem with a taxi in Madrid because I looked right not left, and I nearly got hit. And I start driving on the left instead of on the right.”
Does this suggest he is here to stay? “Who knows,” he smiles. “But for the next four years, yeah. Deffo.”
from http://www.telegraph.co.uk
