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Chelsea‘s N0. 9 Fernando Torres enjoys a huge price tag which makes him the club’s most expensive signing. ‘El-Nino’ joined from Liverpool FC on deadline day of 2011 winter transfer window. In his final days at Anfield, Torres’ performance was relatively poor compared to his early days before the crucial injury. He secured a 50 million price tag since Roman Abramovich was a huge admirer of him.
Since his arrival at Stamford Bridge, Torres has been struggling to settle in a Blue Shirt. He scored only one goal for Chelsea in 2010-11 season which was against West Ham (Chelsea 3- 0 West Ham). In next season also things didn’t change. He failed to win a place in the first eleven, always behind the big man Didier Drogba in the pecking order. When Drogba went to play African Nations Cup, he got some first team action but failed to spark. After Didier Drogba left the club in last May, he got in to the driving seat of the Chelsea attack and enjoyed regular action of first team football. As the current season reaches the halfway mark, he has scored 14 times for Blues in all competition. Under the interim manager Rafael Benitez, Torres is showing the glimpses of his old days and finding the back of net properly. Yet his performance doesn’t justify the huge price tag that Roman Abramovich spent to bring him at Stamford Bridge.
We cannot compare Torres with Didier Drogba in any way. Didier was a physically strong ball winner and obviously a match winner too. If you can score the winning or equalizing goal, you are a match winner. Drogba scored a lot of such goals for Chelsea. A great example of that is the goal he scored in the Champions League final which led Chelsea to the penalty shootout and then he scored the last spot kick to make the Blues European Champions. The match winning ability is something that is a quality of a good striker.
Although he is in third season in the blue shirt, Chelsea is still unable to find at least one match winning goal from Torres. Whenever Torres scores for Chelsea, it is never a crucial goal, that’s the fact. That’s why I think Torres is a score decorator rather than a match winner. A match winning striker is what Chelsea are now missing. In order to find stability in performance, Chelsea must find such a match winner in the upcoming winter transfer window.
