Cashing in on their striker to fund rebuilding Liverpool can show no player is bigger than the club
Football's most powerful clubs prosper by expelling those who no longer want to work there. The institution asserts its power over the individual. These partings can be painful, and appear calamitous, but there is always another talent out there to be hired. The club renews itself, the departing star is doomed one morning to retire.
On one seismic day on Merseyside, Liverpool rejected a �35m bid from Chelsea for Fernando Torres then had a �23m offer for Luis Su�rez accepted. In between, it became apparent Torres was urging Liverpool to keep listening to Chelsea, thus displaying an urge to flee Anfield for Stamford Bridge. Later he submitted a written transfer request which was rejected. In any transfer caper, the point of no return is when the player departs in his head, leaving only his body to reach for the door.
Torres is a textbook case: wanted to leave in the summer ? revived that hope in January, just like Darren Bent. And when Su�rez was signed on the day Torres pressed his claim, Liverpool were either moving on by acquiring a replacement or offering their Spanish star a compelling new reason not to scarper, depending on your interpretation.
Either way Liverpool were recovering their poise, their authority. For too long Anfield has fretted over this or that player absconding, as if a club with five European titles suddenly existed only to stop big names running away. The loss of Xabi Alonso and then Javier Mascherano to Real Madrid and Barcelona respectively induced a kind of rolling terror on the Kop. Those sales left Pepe Reina, Jamie Carragher, Steven Gerrard and Torres from the core of the indispensables who drove Rafa Ben�tez's best team to second in the Premier League with 86 points in May 2009.
With the ownership saga dragging on, Ben�tez falling and then Roy Hodgson being deemed unsuitable by the masses, you can see how Liverpool became preoccupied with retaining the best of their talent. Those days are gone now. The boardroom is comparatively settled, Kenny Dalglish is back in charge and across the club you can sense a restoration of the old identity and values.
So there had to come a day when Liverpool broke out of their old defensive posture and started shouting the odds again at predators, transfer targets and their own players. This means hammering down the best possible deal for Torres ? either now or in the summer ?and then constructing a new side with the money. It means not judging the health of the organisation by whether one household name wants to stay around and be part of the reconstruction.
The biggest clubs are not predestined to lose their most powerful employees. Arsenal have been skilful in dissuading Cesc F�bregas from returning to Barcelona and Manchester United extracted an amazing U-turn from Wayne Rooney, who told them he wanted to join Manchester City before the Glazers smashed the wage structure to keep him.
Cristiano Ronaldo's departure to Spain inspired another diplomatic masterclass from Sir Alex Ferguson, who persuaded him to stay for another season then took �80m from Real Madrid. The Ronaldo deal is the benchmark here because it proved all losses can be absorbed by the most aristocratic outfits. The great club outshines the individual, always and forever. Besides, in the light of his transfer request, Liverpool regulars are entitled to revisit Torres's sluggish early-season form and ask whether the team's future could have been built around someone so ready to disengage.
When he signed, in July 2007, Torres boasted that his friends had been for You'll Never Walk Alone tattoos. In his first season he scored 33 times in 46 outings. Then he struck the winner for Spain at Euro 2008. If every centre-forward in the world bought his A game to a set of fixtures on any given day, surely Torres would be the sport's best No9, ahead of Didier Drogba, David Villa, Diego Forl�n, Samuel Eto'o, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and the rest.
Yet this is secondary to the rehabilitation of Liverpool, where a section of fans have lost all civility and consideration in their dealings with the outside world. To them, debating forums are merely a platform on which to spray abuse. Those of us who see Anfield as a bulwark against the more unedifying features of the modern game hope the anger will soon subside and the humour return.
Liverpool in Dalglish's time as a player was not splenetic, as it is now, and he would not want it to remain so. One step to salvation is to employ only those who want to be there. Torres perked up when Dalglish took over but also when the January transfer window opened to offer an escape. Courted by Manchester City in the summer, El Ni�o stayed at Anfield reluctantly and was not sufficiently reassured by the Fenway Sports Group takeover to reject Chelsea's overtures.
Players talk hogwash about leaving "to win things". They leave mainly for money and because they tire of sharing teams with colleagues they know to be inferior. At first selling Torres seemed unthinkable. Then it started to feel like part of the recovery.
Blackpool feel force of league's idiocy
There was a time when people would have considered the accusation that Blackpool had just fielded a weakened team and asked: how could you tell? But then along comes the miracle of mid-table respectability, currently threatened by a run of wobbly results, and Ian Holloway finds himself having to separate first-teamers and stiffs, as if The Seasiders are one big hierarchy.
There is an idiocy at the root of Blackpool's �25,000 fine for fielding a weakened team against Aston Villa in November, and it is to be found in the Premier League's own quest for greater equality. The 25-man squad limit was designed to stop the big clubs stockpiling players and give the smaller ones a better chance of competing.
Within that you would think Blackpool would be able to select any player from a trimmed 25-man list and still be able to claim they were attempting to win the game. The league, though, deemed otherwise, thus discriminating against players 12-25, who have been classified as also-rans with no right to fight their way en masse into the starting XI. No wonder just about every leading manager condemned this nonsensical punishment.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/jan/30/liverpool-fernando-torres-paul-hayward
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