CHELSEA’s season went from bad to worse yesterday with another Premier League defeat at West Brom but still there was little opportunity for forgotten man Fernando Torres to revive his own or his club’s fortunes.
Once again the Spaniard was left kicking his heels on the sidelines, second choice to the ageing Didier Drogba, now 33 and with only seven goals to his name this term.
The call to action for Torres came with just 14 minutes left and he could only watch as West Brom’s Gareth McAuley sealed victory for the Baggies moments later.
It seems the Chelsea nightmare will never end for Torres, a man who, for the best part of a decade, was a force of nature, first for Atletico Madrid and then for Liverpool. Now, under Andre Villas-Boas, the striker known as El Nino has been blown so far off course that his last league goal came on September 24.
For a man who scored 91 times in just 214 matches for Atletico and 81 in only 142 appearances at Liverpool, that’s a drought of East African proportions.
So poor has Torres’ recent form been that he’s now unrecognisable from the player who first shot to prominence at the Vicente Calderon Stadium with the Atletico youth team.
Raddy Antic was manager of the Spanish club when Torres was re-writing the goalscoring record books for Atletico’s juniors and the former Barcelona and Real Madrid boss places the blame for the Spaniard’s demise firmly at the door of the beleaguered Chelsea coach.
“If you come from Liverpool to Chelsea and you hardly score in a year then something is wrong, not just with the player but also with the club,” he says.
“If you have a player of his quality you have to choose a different way to play the game.
“If you look at Chelsea, they’re not playing the combination that would suit Torres. For my opinion, of course Torres is not the same player that he was but the coach has to think about what he can do for him to score the goals.”
There is no question that Torres – recently dropped by Spain for the first time in five years – isn’t giving his all for Chelsea.
But Antic said: “Like most strikers he needs the ball – which isn’t happening at Chelsea. He has lost his confidence and that’s everything for a striker.”
