Torres mega-thread

[a stoner]

Does he really think that Chelsea are going to spend upwards of £150m in the summer to get them back on track? £50m on him, then they need a whole new back four and another striker... As well as Cech not being the keeper he once was.... He's not thought about this at all....

 

Fine time is running out, but why the fucking Chavs?

 

Maybe he's pissed off with getting fouled and not getting fuck all yet he sees dog breath getting a free kick for falling over a blade of grass 10 yards from anyone.

I am of the opinion that he hasn't been playing as well for a while now and if he's put in a transfer request then he can go, I just don't want it to be to a prem club that's all.

[navbasi]

Maybe he's pissed off with getting fouled and not getting fuck all yet he sees dog breath getting a free kick for falling over a blade of grass 10 yards from anyone.

I am of the opinion that he hasn't been playing as well for a while now and if he's put in a transfer request then he can go, I just don't want it to be to a prem club that's all.

 

I'm surprised City haven't made a move yet, I'm sure it's already been mentioned in the previous 76 pages but Tevez will be gone in the summer and they'll need to find a replacement....

[bobhorse]

If you take away the emotion and look at the lodgic i for one can understand Torres

 

Up until Friday he had be told things that hadn't happened by the owners old and new who had both said they would build a side around him that would win things

 

He had seen the man who signed him leave the club to be replaced by a dickhead saw Poulson and Konchesky arrive along side Cole (who cant get a game) then he sees the dickhead get the boot and a man given the job till the end of the season and he has seen the 4 players we are linked with in N'Zogbia Adam Saurez and Young all of which seemed to be stalling over cost it must have looked at this moment in time that we are a club without any vision or long term planning

 

It is now that the owners need to be looking long term and they can make a start by employing Dalglish and his staff on long term deals complete the signings that are needed in this window and tell Torres that this is the way we are going and we want you to be a part of that we will take the next 6 months to show you that we are working to put this club back on top but in the summer if you still feel the same way we will allow you the move if that is what you want

 

But a club with no long term manager in place and no new signings isnt were the best striker in Europe should be

 

we dont know if it was his request that prompted Liverpool to stump up the extra to sign Suarez i am disappionted that this has been leaked in the press from Chelseas end but i dont think any Liverpool fan would have expected Torres to stay out of the CL for 2 season which could be the case if he stays here but he could have left with our blessings in the summer had this not come out now

He is a professional so he should get his head down and play with two strikers we should score many more goals and 4th place isnt out the question seeing as we won the prem the last time we were in this position

[Pidge]

Good post.

[Code]

Good and sensible post that.

[Row 9]

Agreed, but its the Chelsea thing that hurts most.

[manwiththestick]

If you take away the emotion and look at the lodgic i for one can understand Torres

 

Up until Friday he had be told things that hadn't happened by the owners old and new who had both said they would build a side around him that would win things

 

He had seen the man who signed him leave the club to be replaced by a dickhead saw Poulson and Konchesky arrive along side Cole (who cant get a game) then he sees the dickhead get the boot and a man given the job till the end of the season and he has seen the 4 players we are linked with in N'Zogbia Adam Saurez and Young all of which seemed to be stalling over cost it must have looked at this moment in time that we are a club without any vision or long term planning

 

It is now that the owners need to be looking long term and they can make a start by employing Dalglish and his staff on long term deals complete the signings that are needed in this window and tell Torres that this is the way we are going and we want you to be a part of that we will take the next 6 months to show you that we are working to put this club back on top but in the summer if you still feel the same way we will allow you the move if that is what you want

 

But a club with no long term manager in place and no new signings isnt were the best striker in Europe should be

 

we dont know if it was his request that prompted Liverpool to stump up the extra to sign Suarez i am disappionted that this has been leaked in the press from Chelseas end but i dont think any Liverpool fan would have expected Torres to stay out of the CL for 2 season which could be the case if he stays here but he could have left with our blessings in the summer had this not come out now

He is a professional so he should get his head down and play with two strikers we should score many more goals and 4th place isnt out the question seeing as we won the prem the last time we were in this position

 

Good post apart from the highlighted bit.

[gkmacca]

Chelsea is our Moriarty. We need to wrestle that club until it falls over a cliff.

[TheMysteryMan]

Goal.com

 

Torres talks still ongoing, want Anelka included and value deal at around £50m

[gkmacca]

Goal.com

 

Torres talks still ongoing, want Anelka included and value deal at around £50m

 

That was posted ages ago.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Anelka! seriously! is that suppose to placate fans, we have got another much older much worse striker alongside 40 million that will do us no good this season. In the meantime Chelsea get one of our very few world class players to cement a top 4 place and leave us looking like a small club who did the right thing bowing down to there betters.

 

Fuck that, fuck chelsea and fuck torres, force him to stay the little shit and see if chelsea end up in champions league football and if he still wants to go if they dont.

 

Anelka thats insult to injury.

[aiyic]

Agreed, but its the Chelsea thing that hurts most.

 

Not here. Couldn't be that. The very fact he's asked for a transfer, especially at this time, is hurtful.

 

I couldn't give a toss if he went to Yooniyrah.

 

It's odd that he's choosing Chelsea, but not really that hurtful. They're not pulling up any trees, plus...we've beaten them. And that must say something.

[RedinSweden]

I think he will stay.

[ZZZZ]

Torres is getting over a hundred grand a week. Injured or not, he has collected that on a weekly basis. The club have stood by their part of the deal. He should stand by his.

 

And, mentioning the quality of the players we have been linked with as an excuse is wrong in my opinion. Show me another team, other than City, who have brought in big signings better than a Young, Adam and Suarez ?

[Duff Man]

I wouldn't be too unhappy with £50m plus Anelka.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Torres is getting over a hundred grand a week. Injured or not, he has collected that on a weekly basis. The club have stood by their part of the deal. He should stand by his.

 

And, mentioning the quality of the players we have been linked with as an excuse is wrong in my opinion. Show me another team, other than City, who have brought in big signings better than a Young, Adam and Suarez ?

 

We havent bought Young or Adam.

[KopOut]

we have much m ore pressing problems than Torres leaving. What are we gonna do with Gerrard now that Meireles is out playing him in his preferred position? With Kuyt now shoing real signs of wear and tear, I'd make him play on the right mid. Johnson is adapting well to the left, and between him and Aurelio, they've the left covered.

[Row 9]

I’m of the opinion that foreign players be it Torres, Alonso, Lucas or whoever are here for the money, quality of the league and experience but they are never truly faithful. I can accept that going ‘home’ to wherever they originate from is inevitable and in most cases just a matter of time but to want a transfer to a club of a smaller stature albeit better than us at this moment in time in terms of the nine points and a game in hand, is hard for me to take.

[gkmacca]

Anelka! seriously! is that suppose to placate fans, we have got another much older much worse striker alongside 40 million that will do us no good this season. In the meantime Chelsea get one of our very few world class players to cement a top 4 place and leave us looking like a small club who did the right thing bowing down to there betters.

 

Fuck that, fuck chelsea and fuck torres, force him to stay the little shit and see if chelsea end up in champions league football and if he still wants to go if they dont.

 

Anelka thats insult to injury.

 

Quite. And how old is he now? 31? Not exactly Fenway's 'focus on youth' policy. We should have kept him last time but, if we had, we'd now be saying 'get rid'. We need goals. Lots of them.

[billybonzo]

It is a prospect that was once not just untenable, but unthinkable.

 

Yet Liverpool fans should brace themselves this weekend, for the prospect of their idol Fernando Torres being paraded in front of the public on Monday, sporting the blue of Chelsea.

 

Chelsea have the money to make the deal, and the will is there from both the London club and the player himself to make it happen.

 

Liverpool have even got a deal done for Torres’ replacement Luis Suarez. The £23million price eventually agreed - double Liverpool’s initial offer - suggests that extra money is coming from somewhere...and now it seems clear exactly where

 

Maybe only time - the transfer deadline is 11pm Monday - can stand in the way of Torres leaving Anfield.

 

As the Mirror exclusively revealed yesterday, Roman Abramovich is prepared, ultimately, to punt as much as £60million in pursuit of the striker who was widely regarded before a recent slump as the best in the world.

 

Chelsea have now improved their original offer to £45milion with the additional temptation of £10m Daniel Sturridge thrown into the deal.

 

Torres himself has made it clear that he wants Liverpool’s American owners to listen carefully to Chelsea’s offer, and give it the consideration and respect he believes it deserves.

 

The Spanish star has expressed his desire for a new start to Reds boss Kenny Dalglish, and those close to him back in his home country - where he bolted yesterday to spend a weekend out of the firing line - say he wants to go to Chelsea now, rather than in the summer.

 

There is, surprisingly, unlikely to be quite the resistance from the Liverpool faithful that would have greeted such a prospect even last summer.

 

There has been a feeling all season that Torres has been angling to get away and his form has been, frankly, poor, with many already expressing the opinion that the club should cash in.

 

The seeds for such an incredible scenario were sown last summer, when Chelsea first came calling with a speculative offer of £30million.

 

Torres had become disenchanted at the tail end of the Rafa Benitez regime, but after the departure of the manager and some assurances that a takeover would happen, he was persuaded to stay, despite being keen on the Chelsea move even then.

 

Crucially, a verbal agreement was given that should a £50million offer come in, then he would be given the chance to listen to it. But that agreement was only due to kick in after a season, and was never written formally into his contract.

 

Torres was also approached by potential Liverpool buyer Kenny Huang, who suggested he would invest multi-millions in the transfer market if his takeover was successful, and that idea stuck with him (and was never discouraged) as a takeover loomed closer.

 

Huang though, was not successful, and the new American owners, Fenway Sports Group have been far more pragmatic in their approach to player signings. That has left Torres complaining he somehow feels cheated by the process.

 

That dissatisfaction is compounded by his anger at what he feels is a failure to put the verbally agreed escape clause into a more solid form, even if Fenway Sports rightly point out the agreement was with the previous regime.

 

It has left Torres wanting to join Chelsea, and back home in Spain yesterday, his representatives made no attempt to hide that fact to the national media representatives over there.

 

It is a situation that screams out to be resolved with a sale, especially if the fee proves big enough - as in the case of Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure to Real Madrid - to appease the fans.

 

Logic suggests this skirmish is just the latest in a long war of attrition by Chelsea that is far more likely to lead to a final battleground victory in the summer, when the player has time to confirm what has been apparent for much of this season on the pitch - that his heart lies elsewhere.

 

To lose a player of that stature will undoubtedly be a bitter blow for Liverpool, but it is one the club has suffered before and emerged all the stronger for. Indeed, current boss Kenny Dalglish is living proof that this famous old club is far bigger than any player.

 

When Kevin Keegan, at the height of his fame, decided he wanted to experience life abroad and moved to Hamburg in 1977, devastated fans believed the prospect of replacing him was untenable.

 

But Dalglish arrived in his stead that summer, and wrote his name in Anfield legend, eclipsing even his predecessor’s fame in the process. That is a thought that today’s fans may wish to cling onto this weekend

 

 

Fernando Torres transfer latest: Liverpool striker demands Chelsea's offer be taken seriously after broken promises and lack of investment leave him wanting to quit Anfield - News - MirrorFootball.co.uk

[gkmacca]

THAT was published about 24 hours ago! Are we on an infinite loop or something?? Are we going to just keep posting stories from hours and hours ago? If so it's a fecking waste of time reading.

[Anubis]

That's nearly 24hrs old.

 

EDIT : Beaten to it. The shame....

[billybonzo]

Sorry lads.

[ZZZZ]

We havent bought Young or Adam.

 

I understand that but the argument was made that because these are the quality of the players we are being linked with it is understandable Torres wants out

[StevieH]

Liverpool cannot afford to lose the battle to keep Fernando Torres - Telegraph

 

Liverpool cannot afford to lose the battle to keep Fernando Torres

 

First Cesc Fabregas, then Wayne Rooney and Carlos Tévez, now Fernando Torres. Patience tested, faith exploded, in north London, both sides of Manchester, and finally on Merseyside. Heroes are not what they used to be.

 

In the space of six months, all three of English football’s historical triumvirate - as well as its future force - have seen those idols their fans treasure above all others threaten to reject that devotion.

 

Fabregas asked Arsène Wenger to allow him to move to Barcelona; Rooney informed Manchester United he would not sign a new contract; Tévez pleaded with Manchester City to release him from his £160,000-a-week bondage at Eastlands.

And now Torres, first “verbally intimating” to Liverpool that he wishes to join Chelsea, then handing in a transfer request.

There will be no sympathy washing down the M62, nor emanating from the Emirates: schadenfreude is the order of the day. After all, few laughed as loudly as those on the Kop when their rivals’ talismans showed their true colours.

 

Liverpool fans, of course, believe their pain hurts more than most, just as United and City and Arsenal fans did, or even Chelsea’s, when John Terry fluttered his eyelashes at Eastlands 18 months ago. Such is the nature of support. In this case, it is easy to see why.

 

It was hard, after all, to begrudge Fabregas, a boyhood Barcelona fan, a move back to Catalonia. Rooney - who, crucially, never handed in a transfer request, nor threatened to do so - has nevertheless hardly been portrayed as a paragon of footballing virtue. Tévez joined City for their riches: they must live by the sword and die by the sword, even if it is gilded.

 

But Torres is different. This is the player who insisted that, upon departing Atlético Madrid, he would only do so for Liverpool. This is the player who bore the legend “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on an armband while still playing in Spain. This is the player who spoke openly, as recently as October 2009, of Liverpool being the only team he would play for in this country.

 

“I hope to play for many years or maybe even finish my career here,” he said. “Liverpool is my English team and I don’t think about playing for another one.”

 

And yet now he is not only contemplating a move to Chelsea, but has destabilised the club he once professed to love with just three days left of the transfer window. On the day Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, announced the £22.8 million signing of Luis Suarez as a signal of their ambition, Torres rocked Anfield to its foundations.

 

That is not something which his disaffected devotees can pin on FSG or Kenny Dalglish. They cannot even blame Roy Hodgson, whose regime sapped so much of Torres’s enthusiasm for life on Merseyside. Rafael Benítez, that scapegoat for all of Liverpool’s ills, likewise.

 

True, FSG’s failure to provide the “quick fix” spending spree Torres and Pepe Reina want has hardly convinced either player they can fulfil their ambitions at Anfield. True, Torres - and Reina - disliked life under Hodgson. True, his relationship with Benítez had grown strained.

 

But the blame for Torres’s state of mind appears to lie at the cowboy-booted feet, in the snakeoil-selling hands and the misleading mouths of Tom Hicks and George Gillett. It was those Americans who promised Torres the world and delivered nothing. It was those Americans who stripped Anfield of its ambition, turning it into a club who existed to win trophies into a club which did well simply to exist.

 

Torres, for at least a year, has instructed his agents to sound out likely destinations for a move: Manchester City and Barcelona have maintained a watching brief, but it is Chelsea who have hovered persistently, waiting for their chance.

 

They thought they had it in the summer, when his representatives tipped them the wink, fluttered their eyelashes, and declared he would be willing to move. Torres, when push came to shove, committed his future to Liverpool. He had never considered leaving, he said.

 

That he had is confirmed in his contract, a clause allowing him to depart for £50 million inserted by the then-managing director, Christian Purslow, should Liverpool remain outside of the Champions League places come summer. To Purslow, that clause safeguarded the club from losing its prized asset on the cheap and, crucially, before a takeover. As soon as FSG arrived, it looked like a time bomb.

 

It exploded on Friday night, as Torres handed in his transfer request. Here, too, even greater pain: he did not want to move to his boyhood club, or to more familiar climes, or to force his team’s owners to invest.

 

No, instead he wished to sign for Chelsea. One of those English teams he had said he would not countenance turning out for. A team who, it could be argued, are in need of rebuilding almost as much as Liverpool. A team who look highly unlikely to fulfil his desire for a league title this season, and whose chances of European glory are only marginally less slim. Their prospects may be brighter than Liverpool’s, but they are still an ageing side.

 

That Torres finds them more appealing than remaining on Merseyside says a lot. Not for FSG, but for Hicks and Gillett. Such is the damage they have done. Torres knows how long the rebuilding of a shattered club will take. He grew up at Colchonero, after all. He bears the weight of Atlético Madrid in his soul. He feels he does not have that time.

 

These Americans, these new Americans, are rather different to their predecessors, though. They despair at the lawlessness of European football; as of last night, there was every indication that they would continue to refuse the striker a move, that they would countenance the idea of keeping him against his will.

 

It is a crucial battle: City kept Tévez, United kept Rooney, Arsenal kept Fabregas, Chelsea retained Terry. It seems unlikely Liverpool and Torres will experience a detente, as in all of those cases. But to lose him would confirm their place outside of England’s elite. It would prove Torres right. Liverpool cannot afford to be different. For their future, they must show Torres he is wrong.