Aaaa kako je ovo dobro pročitati nakon 5 godina. Onako sporo, uz kavu. Opisi vremena iz interviewa te stvarno podsjete koje su to muke bile
A i lakše je iz ove perspektive razumjeti Torresov odlazak kojeg se tom prilikom detaljno i otvoreno dotakao. Top top štivo.
When I decided to move to Liverpool, it was because I was sure Liverpool was very close to becoming the best team in Europe,” he says. “But the situation changed completely…”
“We were not far away from being champions of England and champions of Europe. But we needed to keep the team.
Everything changed when the owners started talking about selling. The mindset of the club went in a different direction. Alonso was sold, Mascherano was sold, Benítez went too. Not all of the money went into new players. The club was saying, ‘We still want to be the best and we want to win’ but doing the opposite.”
“I left my club to win,” he continues. “By the time I left Liverpool, when everybody was leaving, I did not have the feeling that I was going to win there. It was hard because I had been so happy. I’d never felt happier than during my time at Liverpool. But then I felt betrayed. That’s the truth.”
“Benítez was not there: the club sacked him. I finished the World Cup and I talked with Purslow on holiday. He came with Roy Hodgson, who was keen to speak to me. I told them my view on what was happening at the club: that we were so close to winning and now good players were leaving. What was our future?
“Purslow explained that Liverpool were in the process of being sold to new owners and that nobody could leave in the summer because the club had a higher value with the players they had at that time. ‘We cannot sell you,’ he told me. I told them we would not win without investment and that it worried me we’d fall behind very quickly. I explained that when I joined the club, the mood was totally different and that Benítez’s ambition had taken me to Liverpool. Purslow told me that nobody would leave but as soon as the club was sold he would speak to the new owner and try to find a solution. If I wanted to leave then, I could.
“Nobody ever said to me, ‘We want you to stay and be like Stevie.’ The message was: ‘We’ll sell the club and you can leave.’ That means to me the people running the club did not really care about Liverpool, only themselves. They wanted to save themselves. And then Mascherano was sold anyway.”
“Boston-based investment firm New England Sports Ventures (later to become Fenway Sports Group) acquired Liverpool in a move that Hicks described as “an epic swindle”. Boston-based investment firm New England Sports Ventures (later to become Fenway Sports Group) acquired Liverpool in a move that Hicks described as “an epic swindle”. Damien Comolli, a Frenchman, was appointed to the role, having achieved varied success at Tottenham Hotspur before.“
“I went to talk with Comolli and told him about my concerns and what had happened. He said the same as Purslow: ‘No, no, you cannot leave because we do not have any other players to play.’ Again, he was not telling me, ‘You cannot leave because we need you for the project.’ It was, ‘OK, we will find someone else, then maybe you can leave.’ It said to me that they did not want to keep me, really. They wanted to find someone else. But first they wanted to wait until the summer.
“Comolli told me Liverpool were going to buy Luis Suárez but because Suárez was not a goalscorer I needed to stay until they found one. ‘Suárez is the player to play behind; he is not going to score too many goals,’ was the message. You can see they signed Suárez thinking he could not score goals…”
Torres affords a light smile recalling this memory, insisting that history has since proven that Suárez deserves to be considered one of the game’s best modern strikers alongside Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
“Comolli told me that the new owners [FSG], they had an idea of how to spend their investment. They wanted to bring in young players, to build something new. I was thinking to myself, This takes time to work. It takes two, three, four, maybe even 10 years. I didn’t have that time. I was 27 years old. I did not have the time to wait. I wanted to win. Here we are five years later and they are still trying to build — around the same position in the league as when I left.”
“When Chelsea made their first offer before the game at Wolverhampton, I spoke with Dalglish and Steve Clarke [the assistant manager]. I think Comolli wanted to be at the meeting but I told them I only wanted to speak with the coaches. Again, I told Dalglish and Clarke that I only left my club to win and now we were so far away from winning. I told them I felt as though I’d been lied to. Despite telling me they would not sell the good players, Mascherano was sold. I told them that the Chelsea offer was a good one and it would allow me to keep improving and the club would receive a huge financial reward. Dalglish told me that he did not want me to leave — he was the only one. ‘I need you here,’ he said, although he never spoke about his reasons, so they may have been the same as Comolli’s.
“Before leaving the room, I thought we had an understanding. It might have been a difficult conversation but there was respect on both sides. It was no pasa nada [no problem]. Dalglish told me he’d always be grateful for what I’d done for Liverpool and that hopefully I’d stay.
“Whether I stayed or left, the idea was to continue as normal. I wanted to do everything the right way. I scored twice at Wolverhampton, then played OK against Fulham three days later at Anfield. Dalglish had told me he did not want me to leave but at the same time I knew Liverpool were negotiating with Chelsea, so maybe this was not the truth.
“What I did not expect was what they did with the media, changing the way it looked. They tried to show that I was the guilty one, el único [the only one]. I’d gone face to face with Dalglish to explain the situation so that everything was clear. I did not use my agent. He knew how I felt: I wanted to win but at Liverpool it did not seem as though that was possible for at least a few years. And you can see what happened in the few years after — I was not wrong.
“I told him City had a great team, United were still winning things, then there was Chelsea as usual and Tottenham. We were so far from them. I told him about my conversations with Purslow in the summer and that I stayed then because I did not want to be responsible for Liverpool not being sold.
“I explained to him that nobody ever wanted me to stay for the right reasons — reasons only related to football. I told him Comolli had told me I could leave at the end of the season. He was not interested in me staying for ever. I told Dalglish I had the chance to leave then — in January — and I did not know whether Chelsea, City or Bayern Munich would come again. I knew the season was not going to be very good — we had been in the bottom half of the table. Who knows what is going to happen? I had the chance to go and it was a great offer for the club also. But if you want me to stay for ever, tell me that. If Liverpool were going to build a great team again, I wanted to stay, there would be no reason to leave, though I did not think this was going to happen, because I did not believe in Comolli’s ideas. I wasn’t sure whether he really cared about Liverpool at all.”
By selling Torres, Comolli would potentially have more money to play with, more money to exert influence on the club in his first few months in the job. It is Dalglish whom Torres feels most let down by, though.
“My respect for him was huge. I knew that Dalglish was one of the best players in the history of the club, that everyone loved him. But I think he had the power to change the situation. I don’t know why he didn’t do so. If he had asked for money for players, I think they’d have given it to him. If he had insisted to the owners that I stay, then I would have stayed. He came and the team started playing better. I started scoring more goals. The way he wanted to play was much better for the players we had. Steve Clarke was a fantastic coach and he did a great job too.
“Stories appeared in the press about me demanding to leave, though. This made it difficult for me to stay and to trust the people at Liverpool. Someone must have told them. Because I did not.”
I remind Torres that a similar thing happened with Javier Mascherano when he left for Barcelona at the end of the previous August. After a man-of-the-match performance against Arsenal on the opening day of the season, it was reported that he had refused to play against Manchester City. I wondered whether Liverpool were in the business of discrediting a departing player’s name so the club looked better and the parting of ways was made more acceptable to supporters.
“The stories that appeared in the press changed the view of everybody including myself. It was not the truth. The truth was that I moved from my home to a club that was ready to win. When I left, there was not a single piece of the winning culture left.
“What’s so hard for me is that I felt the relationship between myself and the club was really close. That’s why I tried to go and talk to them straight. I will say this again: I did not use my agent. I went first to Purslow, then to Comolli and after to Dalglish — all face-to-face. I tried to explain to each one of them why I left Atlético to go to Liverpool in the first place. I tried to explain that you couldn’t expect to win if you sold your best players. Nobody could give me a straight answer, a football answer.
“It looked like I wanted to leave for Chelsea and I did not love Liverpool any more. It looked like I did not want to train and play and that’s why I asked for a transfer request. It was presented as if I was a traitor. It was not like this in the discussion. Liverpool could not admit they were doing something wrong with the whole team. They had to find a guilty one.”
“John Henry was the last person I spoke to and he was great to me, I cannot say anything bad,” Torres says. “He told me he did not want me to leave. If I did want to leave, he told me that the price had to be very high. I told him that I did not want to talk about numbers; that was for him to decide and I would respect whatever decision he came to.”
The discussion with Steven Gerrard about the situation was the one he dreaded most.
“I went to him before speaking with Dalglish. We were in the dressing room at Melwood alone, sitting together. I explained there had been an offer from Chelsea and that the team was not going to be good in the years to come. I asked him what he thought I should do. Stevie told me not to go, never to leave Liverpool. But he realised too I had to do what was best for me; he understood that my situation and his were different. These were words from the best captain.
“I know that Stevie was devastated when I left. I was as well, in some ways. I remember the flight from Liverpool to London. I did not know what to feel. I was not happy, I was not angry; I was empty. I was on a helicopter and it was getting dark, flying over Liverpool below. I began to feel sad. I was so happy there, so, so happy…
Anketa
