Fernando Torres Should Be Judged Like Any Normal Player

Fernando Torres is back! No, he's not, he's rubbish again. Wait, he's back again! Is he? Who knows? He scored a goal! He missed from five yards! What is 'back' anyway? This is all too confusing!

In the past two games, the fluctuations of Torres's perceived status have seemingly been wilder than usual. After he scored twice against Schalke in mid-week he was king again, then after missing an easy chance against Manchester City he was back to being a chump, before scoring one and setting up another put him on top of the world. It's frankly difficult to keep track.

Torres' problem is that basically everything he does is judged through the prism of what came before. To an extent most footballers are seen this way, but none to the degree that Torres is. Barely anything is seen in isolation, for what it is. Every player has good and bad games and does good and bad things during the course of a game, but the good or bad things Torres does are amplified and exaggerated. A goal and a decent performance and he's 2009 vintage, a miss or a baby elephant first touch and he's a colossal failure who shouldn't be in the Chelsea team.

A TV commentator even speculated that Torres might be 'back' after he scored against Swindon in the League Cup. Swindon are currently eighth in League One. No other player is treated like that.

The reasons for this wildly different judgement are obvious—the £50 million Chelsea paid for him in 2011 and seemingly being a favourite of Roman Abramovich, foisted on a series of managers. Of course, neither of those things have anything to do with him, so why unfairly judge him based on those parameters?

There is a wider point here about the nature of transfer fees, and how these days they're less a monetary measure of a player's quality, more a reflection of circumstance and the needs, economic and otherwise, of the two clubs in question. In this case, Chelsea/Abramovich wanted to make a splash, Liverpool needed a replacement and a profit, which is how we arrived at a £50 million fee and the ensuing 'narrative' that Torres is judged by. But I digress.

This is all a comparison to the Torres that played for Liverpool between 2007 and 2009. That Torres is gone, and Chelsea have a completely different player on their hands. We've all worked out by now that Torres isn't the world-beating, legendary, record transfer fee-worthy forward of those days, if he was ever actually any of those things anyway. He is, however, still a perfectly good striker who has a very respectable five goals in eight starts so far this season. Perfectly good strikers should not be hailed as a hero when they succeed but derided as a waste of space when they err.

"I was unlucky to miss the chance that I missed in the first half. I thought I was offside - I should have stayed more calm," Torres told Sky Sports after the City game. "I missed the chance but then in the next action I got the assist for Andre and then I hit the post.”

See? He talked about the game like he's a normal player, because he is. And now surely it's only fair that he be judged that way.