Following his £50 million transfer from Liverpool, which was a then British transfer record, it took Fernando Torres 14 games to finally score his first Chelsea goal. Torres had gone 732 minutes without a goal for Chelsea and looked desperately short of confidence in his 13 previous appearances.
Torres spent four years at Chelsea but never really reached the heights we saw at Liverpool, and former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher has admitted that Torres had already dropped form before Chelsea went on to spend a massive British transfer record to land the Spaniard.
“I couldn’t believe it, what I mean by that was I knew we had kidded Chelsea,” Carragher revealed on Sky Sports’ Off Script show when asked how he had reacted to Torres’ move to Chelsea
“What I mean by that is I’d played with Torres, for the last 12 months, he was a shadow of his former self.
“I think for 18 months at Liverpool he was the best striker in the world. And I think he had such a good record against Chelsea that it obviously stuck in the owner’s mind. “Not so much a manager because the manager changed so often at Chelsea. At that stage, Chelsea were still a club where the owner was buying players who he wanted.
“I think [Andriy] Shevchenko was a similar case as well. What happened for us, and was very fortunate for Liverpool, was we played Chelsea that season, we weren’t having a great season, Torres having a really poor time but he scored two against Chelsea and I think we won 2-0 or 3-0 under Roy Hodgson at Anfield.
“And I think the decision was probably made then for Roman Abramovich, ‘As soon as January comes we’re going for Fernando Torres’.
“Now £50 million was major money at that stage and we were all in a state of shock. “Listen, gutted that Torres was gone but I think we all knew he was never going to be the same player.