Torres (9 page)
Yogurt
Conversation with former Atlético de Madrid striker, Francisco Miguel Narváez Machón, better known as ‘Kiko’
A baseball cap above his black curly hair, wearing a leather jacket, coloured jersey and a weary look is how Kiko appears in the hotel bar at Madrid’s
Ciudad de la Imagen
. He has just emerged, battle-scarred and breathless, from a game of indoor football, during which he has scored the equaliser, but which has left him completely drained
.
In little more than an hour, he will be on television commentating for the Spanish channel,
Sexta
, on the Copa del Rey (King’s Cup) tie between Atlético Bilbao and Sevilla (Seville).
Born in Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia and now aged 37, Kiko has a long career behind him. After three years in the Cadiz team and a gold medal with the Spanish national side at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he became the figurehead player at Atlético Madrid. Chalking up eight seasons (from 1993 to 2001), 278 appearances and 64 goals, he played a key role in the squad, which, with the Serbian ex-Luton Town (1980–84) player Radomir Antic as manager, captured a league and cup double in the 1995–96 season – the last silverware won by the club.
Tall (1.89m/6ft 2ins) and rangy, he was in a class of his own, a striker but not in the classic sense of the word. He
played behind the main striker, combining great imagination and vision with decisive assists and scoring many goals of his own. He was Fernando Torres’ hero.
Kiko takes a long drink of water to rehydrate himself before recalling the end of May 2001 – the debut of El Niño.
‘The team was in the Second Division and the situation wasn’t good. Results were mixed and we weren’t playing well. To sum it up, we had a lot of problems. At the beginning of the season, we’d been hovering above the relegation zone and getting promotion was looking unlikely. To raise the fans’ hopes, they decided to give a debut to El Niño, a true
atlético
, someone with whom the fans could identify. It was a marketing exercise, something which would divert the public’s attention from the day-to-day happenings at the club.’
‘We thought we’d have to have some kind of arrangement with a children’s nursery. What was a kid of seventeen doing in a team of experienced professionals? And above all, we were suddenly being asked to look after this youngster when we were right in the middle of our final, crucial matches. I remember the first day he introduced himself to me in the dressing room. He was thin, freckled, with an extremely slight build and very shy. As he went to shake my hand, he was very emotional. I was the team captain and his idol.’
‘I was tall, like him and, like him a forward, although Fernando is more powerful and more direct. I played in a different style. I’d won the Cup and League title just when a young boy begins to idolise footballers and to admire a player who plays in his position. I was a committed
atlético
,
like him. It’s normal if you come from the junior team to have someone as an example, a role model. Raúl in (Real) Madrid had El Buitre (Emilio Butragueño, a goal-scorer for Real Madrid during the 1980s), Fernando identified with me.’
‘Yes, that’s true – him and Dani Güiza. They repeated it. I really appreciate that.’
‘Yes, the two are very alike. In that match against Ajax, Caminero, playing deep, began the move for Aguilera on the right wing continuing up towards the goal line before passing the ball backwards. It came to me just in front of the penalty area and, half-turning, I shot towards the far post and it went in. I remember Fernando’s goal perfectly well because I was in the Calderón (Atlético Madrid’s stadium, the Estadio Vicente Calderón) as a TV commentator and because it’s the only goal that El Niño has scored at (Real) Madrid. Fernando got hold of the ball before passing it to Galletti who went down the right wing, putting a cross into the centre, where Torres controlled it skilfully with his best leg, the right, on the outside of his foot, and shot towards the post to the right of (Iker) Casillas (the Real Madrid goalkeeper) who could do absolutely nothing. Two important goals, especially El Niño’s. Real (Madrid) was his obsession.’
‘That day I wasn’t in the team. I was having problems with the club – and with my ankles. They weren’t calling me up for home matches. But Fernando had already taken everyone by surprise, with his personality, self-confidence and willingness to learn plus his professional qualities and maturity. No, he certainly wasn’t a kid you had to look after. In training, he came up against defenders like ‘Super-López’ (Juan Manuel López Martínez, an Atlético stalwart who spent ten years at the club) and Hernández (Jean François, a Frenchman who had joined from Rayo Vallecano) and he didn’t give an inch. He was strong and determined to show what he could do.’
‘Yes, at Albacete I was in the team. When Torres scored I thought ‘Bloody hell, why didn’t they take me off half an hour earlier!’ That was because he came on as a substitute for me. I had told him something like, ‘Good luck, come on kid, you can do it,’ and five minutes later he scored the winning goal with a superb header. What a kid …’
‘I was very happy to pass the baton to El Niño
.
It was rewarding for a true
atlético
to see that, after you, there was someone you could have confidence in. I could see myself reflected in him and his happiness. We’ve all been junior players – our dream was to get into the first team and score a goal wearing the shirt. Fernando achieved that.
‘That’s right. It gave us an important victory. It kept our promotion hopes alive. The fans came onto the pitch and we had our own celebrations in the dressing room. Fernando came and asked me if I would give him the captain’s armband as a present. I told him not be so silly, that it was covered in dirt and worn out, but he insisted so much that in the end I gave in and handed it over. Someone had got hold of some bottles of champagne, which we opened to toast our win. I offered a glass to Fernando and realised he was only seventeen and wasn’t able to drink alcohol and neither did he want to. So we rummaged around in the bag of a team-mate who’d brought in some things to eat – some sandwiches – and we came across a yogurt carton. I opened it and told him ‘You, lad, can make the toast with yogurt.’ And, with plastic carton in hand, that was how he celebrated his first goal!’
‘We stayed in the Second Division and I left the club – with a lot of problems and a particular thorn in my side: I never managed to play in a match with Fernando. In training, we understood each other well. Once I gave him two goal-scoring passes and he beamed at me, saying, ‘Let’s see if we can repeat this on the pitch.’ It wasn’t possible. A real shame.’
‘Now I see him as the finished article. Going to Liverpool meant he could take three steps up in one. He’s more relaxed, more himself, without the suffocating responsibilities and the mental wear and tear that were crushing him at Atlético. He didn’t have time properly to evolve. At just
eighteen, he had to take up the baton and be the flag bearer. In footballing terms, he has seen a lot in a very short space of time. But he’s an intelligent lad, who, thanks to his family and the right kind of environment – without any false praise where people always tell you you’re great when you’re not – hasn’t lost his way, as has happened to other youngsters. No, he’s gone in the right direction. In Liverpool, he’s made his match.’
‘That he’s found the right kind of environment. Reina, Aberloa, Xabi Alonso have taken him under their wing. Steve Gerrard and Jamie Carragher have been able to guide him. Benítez, who is a perfectionist with great attention to detail, has helped him to iron out those imperfections his critics have always accused him of, like his passing and moving, his finishing, his ability to lose his marker, his shooting … Before, his shooting wasn’t so good, now it is. And then you have to recognise that English football, with its end-to-end games and spaces in which to run, is ideal for someone with Fernando’s qualities. Yes, without doubt, Liverpool has given him a big step up.’
‘When he scored the first goal against Chelsea, I saw that as the turning point, I saw a player who had been liberated. From there on in, he had a marvellous season. And now he’s Number 3 in the world (in the FIFA World Player of the Year 2008 results).
‘Without doubt. That match made his name. The injury to Villa was fortunate for Fernando because he’s a footballer who needs space, who needs to be able to run across the line
of attack from one side to the other. And he showed that he is a man who doesn’t let one down on the big occasions.’
The conversation is interrupted. Patxi Alonso, sports presenter at
Sexta
arrives for a coffee. Between smiles and jokes, the talk comes back to that demanding match of indoor football, the result and the remaining ties up to the final. A glance at the watch means that it is time to head for the TV. A good piece of programming.
In El Niño’s hands
There are 20,000 of them in and around the Neptune fountain in central Madrid.
‘
¡
Adiós a Segunda, adiós!
¡
Adiós a Segunda, adiós!’
– ‘Farewell to the Second Division, Farewell!’ they shout. After 721 days in purgatory, Atlético are back in the First Division. On 27 April 2002, in the Calderón, a victory against Gimnàstic de Tarragona would have given them the mathematical certainty of promotion but on 90 minutes Ángel Cuellar equalises for ‘Nastic’ to make it 3-3 and the torment goes on. But only for a few hours. Thanks to a chance set of favourable results they can celebrate the next day. Not since 1996 – the year in which Atlético won the league and the Copa del Rey – have the fans had a reason to get together around the fountain dedicated to the god of the sea, their ‘temple’, their altar for club celebrations. They do it in style. They jump with joy, sing, wave flags, light flares, throw bangers, mock Real Madrid, their eternal rivals, block the traffic in one of the main thoroughfares of the city, and even clash with the police. The most repeated songs and chants praise manager Luis Aragonés, who has achieved the miracle, and Fernando Torres.
El Niño heard the good news about the return to the first division in the drawing room of his home. Following a frantic round of calls between team-mates, the idea was to go up to the Neptune fountain to join the celebrations. But Paolo Futre, the sporting director, thinks it’s better to wait. They opt for an informal dinner in a city centre restaurant.
It’s not until the early hours that the players arrive in the presence of the god with the trident in his hand, in the Piazza Cánovas del Castillo, not far from the buildings of the Spanish Parliament. Diego Alonso climbs the statue and shouts ‘Atléti
, volvemos a primera.
’ (‘Atléti, we’re coming back to the first division.’)
Fernando Torres, in jean jacket and red-and-white scarf, is grinning from ear-to-ear. Finally, a real pleasure. Because even if lots of people that night can be seen wearing shirts with his name on, it hasn’t all been good during his second year with the senior team. Far from it.
At the beginning of the season, at just seventeen years of age, ‘they made me into an idol and now they are trying to knock down the tower that they created. The manager told me: “The higher they put you, the harder you fall.” That’s to say, try to learn to be like one of the others,’ he confesses in an interview and adds: ‘In any case, I’ve been at a much lower level than I thought, I’ve not had the season that I was hoping for. I’ve encountered more difficulties than I thought I would.’
What difficulties has the young promise of Spanish football encountered? A lot, beginning with the manager. Luis Aragonés, an Atlético midfielder in the 1960s and 70s with 123 goals to his name, a legend to the fans, has returned for the fifth time as manager to take the team back to the first division. But the
Sabio de Hortaleza
(Wise Man of Hortaleza), as they call him, doesn’t have much faith in the youngster. As often as not, he sends him directly to the stand or leaves him for entire matches to warm the substitutes’ bench. On the rare occasions he does start a match, he is substituted without fail. Changes that drive El Niño crazy even if, after thinking things over, he ends up admitting the gruff manager was right. The Wise Man corrects him continuously: ‘Torres, not like that!’ ‘Torres, do it well, not beautifully,
well!’ Torres this, Torres that. He takes him off the pitch to put on a defender or the Uruguayan, Diego Alonso, an honest worker of the ball. With the lad from Fuenlabrada, he uses all the old football conventions. Or to be more exact, the brilliant, celebrated youngster must be treated harshly – he needs to be taught how to behave on the pitch and in the dressing room. He must be the first to arrive and the last to leave, to talk little and listen a lot, to be humble, he must never get cocky, he must respect his team-mates and not dare to contradict the gaffer. Training – or rather, commandments – that years later Torres will consider valuable, but at seventeen, leave him baffled.
The continuous put-downs and the constant substitutions to a competitive and fiercely proud young man like Fernando, do him damage. And there’s also the fact that Luis cannot stomach the youngster’s media exposure. The more they talk about him in the press, the less he plays. A popularity that even attracts the jealousy of his team-mates, who, in some cases, are twelve years older than him, and who find this callow youth hogging the headlines hard to handle. So much fame also brings with it a special attention on the part of opposing defenders. ‘I can confirm that if they think you are a “name”, it’s worse. You have to suffer much more marking,’ comments Torres.
The truth is that, on many occasions, in order to respect the famous conventions of football, his rivals gave him a rough time. As do the press. Many had given him their backing and feel betrayed by a performance that is not up to expectations. They talk of the crisis in his second year, of how the Under-17 World Cup at the beginning of the season didn’t allow him to start the league campaign on a good footing, pointing to his goal tally (only six) as evidence of this.
The only thing in his defence: he plays some really tremendous games. But they don’t count for much, seeing that even he comes to doubt the faith placed in him. Fernando’s reply, or rather revenge, comes first with the victory in the Under-19 European championship in Norway and then in the first division.
He makes his top-flight debut on 1 September 2002 in the Camp Nou against Louis Van Gaal’s Barcelona. Ten months after he’s scored thirteen goals in the championship and one in the Copa del Rey. He has become the star of the side – one that everyone expects to see shining. He has assumed big responsibilities and has become, without doubt, one of the best in the team. On two occasions he brought the entire Vicente Calderón stadium to its feet.
On 12 January 2003, against Deportivo La Coruña, he creates two spectacular moves. The first, he controls in the penalty area using his chest, gets round defender Noureddine Nybet with a lob and does a half-turn to score with a devastating left-foot shot. The second, he nutmegs Nybet, which dumbfounds Donato, leaving him to make a winning assist for Correa to score. The crowd gives him an ovation and his name rings out across the nearby Manzanares river and echoes through the surrounding neighbourhood.
On 24 May, in the same stadium, he puts on another show. It’s the last minute of the second half when Torres begins warming up on the edge of the pitch. The fans have been demanding his appearance for some time and Atlético is losing 1-2 against Villarreal. Only he can save the situation. It’s true.
On 70 minutes he shoots from outside the area, the ball just inside the angle between post and crossbar. Four minutes later, he scores the winning goal, a great left-foot shot, after a pass from Luis Garcia (who moved to Liverpool in 2004, returning to Atlético in 2007, the same year that
Fernando went in the opposite direction). Poor Pepe Reina, then keeper with Villarreal and a future team-mate of his at Liverpool, has one of the worst afternoons of his career. ‘Imposing’, ‘formidable’, ‘marvellous’, are just some of the adjectives used to describe the 19-year-old’s display. They talk of the emergence in
La Liga
of a shining young talent. They cannot recall anything of its kind since the arrival of Raúl at Real Madrid. But El Niño has learned from Aragonés to avoid any kind of vanity like the plague, replying to all the praise saying:
‘People get carried away making comparisons but that’s a waste of time. I don’t know how one gets to be a star. But however one does, I still need to do it. I’ve only just started and we’ll see where I am when, like Raúl, I am 26 and playing international matches.’
But the positive opinions don’t only come from the public. They are also being voiced by his team-mates. Demetrio Albertini, the midfielder who, with the Milan of Arrigo Sacchi and Fabio Capello, has won everything and more, explains: ‘He’s still a boy and has to mature, but he has talent. He’s going to be very big. In Italy he’s liked by Milan and Juventus. They talk a lot about him.’ And Fernando talks a lot with Demetrio, Atlético’s new signing: ‘He was talking about Milan, about Marco van Basten, who was my idol, he lent me tapes to watch him in action to explain to me his style of playing. And he always recommended me to learn everything I could before leaving.’
The year 2003 is Atlético’s centenary. On 26 April 1903, a group of Basque students at a mine engineering college in Madrid founded a new football club as a branch of the Basque side, Atlético Bilbao. They initially played in blue and white strips, similar to those of Blackburn Rovers. But eight years later the main team in Bilbao and the Madrid branch had changed to red and white (similar to
Southampton), one theory being that the new colours were cheaper because this combination was used to make mattresses and the leftovers could be converted into football shirts. It also helps explain why the club became known as
los colchoneros
(the mattress-makers). It’s those same stripes that earn an entry in the Guinness book of records when a flag measuring about 1 mile long by 8 yards wide is paraded through the streets of Madrid from the Neptune fountain to the Vicente Calderón stadium. It’s the main party for the centenary with lots of paella, fireworks and skydivers, together with leading local figures and even royalty in the form of Prince Felipe, the heir to the Spanish throne. It’s a pity that Atlético then go and lose 0-1 against Osasuna.
Fernando, who comes 19th in a supporters’ survey to choose the best players in the club’s history, is not on the pitch. He’s taking part in the celebrations of a proud Atlético as an ordinary fan. ‘I have come up through the ranks, I know what it is to wear the red and white, what it means to be in this team,’ he says. Unfortunately, a tear in the fibres of a leg muscle is keeping him off the pitch for around a month.
When he comes back, the club’s situation has changed and become even more difficult. Jesús Gil, the godfather figure of Atlético, resigns as president after sixteen years. During his time in charge, the club has had 31 managers, almost double what Liverpool or Manchester United have had in 100 years. With Gil, Atlético have one league title and three Copas del Rey and finished in the second division for two years. With Gil, the ex-mayor of Marbella, the club has often teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and been the focus of numerous legal investigations. Gil ends up in prison. When he leaves, fed up with being insulted and accused of being the one responsible for all the club’s failings, he hands over the reins to his son, Miguel Ángel
Gil Marín and film producer Enrique Cerezo … The club shares held by Jesús Gil are seized in connection with an investigation into fraud and falsification. Financially, the club is in ruins but he does not want to be singled out as the president who sells Fernando Torres or the Calderón to put things right.
Jesús Gil had been like a father to El Niño: ‘I remember him with affection, his family treated me as if I was one of their own.’ Gil, who died on 14 May 2004, goes and so does Luis Aragonés. Just six matches from the end of the league, he says he can’t work as he would like to and has no intention of respecting his contract, which expires at the end of the season. Before going, has he changed his opinion of El Niño? Not at all: ‘Fernando Torres could be a very good footballer, who still has to correct some flaws,’ he says in the club magazine. ‘Right now, he’s performing well in the Primera Liga but, paradoxically, in almost all the matches where he hasn’t played, we’ve won. Irreplaceable? It’s very difficult for a player in a team to be like that but Fernando is certainly a very important element in front of the opposition goal.’ The warring between the two continues and it will resurface some years later in the national side.
Gregorio Manzano arrives for the 2003–04 season from Mallorca, where he won the Copa del Rey. He declares immediately that he wants to put his priorities into the attack because that’s what the fans are demanding. He counts on a midfield notable for the presence of Cholo Simeone, who, after several years in Italy (Inter and Lazio), returns to Atlético, and on a left wing, where Musampa is expected to perform well. In attack, to support El Niño, there is the Greek, Nikolaidis:
‘Our objective was to consolidate our status and after that, fight to get as high up the table as possible. We had a good season and we surpassed our initial expectations,
relative to our sporting and economic resources. The only thing that was missing was Europe. In the last game against Zaragoza, the team couldn’t manage a win and we missed out on the UEFA Cup through a lower goal average than Sevilla,’ as Gregorio Manzano, or ‘The Teacher’ as he was known, recalls today. He boasts ten years of Spanish first division management with more than 300 matches under his belt. Manzano, now back with Mallorca, hasn’t forgotten that year in Atlético, just as he hasn’t forgotten Fernando, with whom he maintains good relations.
Going back to the beginning of that season, one should say that Torres avoided a goalscoring crisis thanks, above all, to the confidence of the manager, who has given him a starting place when neither his dribbling nor his shooting is working. It’s a situation from which he escapes only at the end of October. Against Manzano’s former side, El Niño finally unleashes himself and doesn’t stop hitting the net – so much so that halfway through the season, he is the first division’s top goalscorer with eleven goals. And at the end of the season – won by the Valencia of Rafa Benítez – Torres is the club’s top-scorer, only four less than league top-scorer Ronaldo.
One of those goals is a masterpiece: ‘It is without a shadow of a doubt that great goal at Betis that gave us our 1-2 victory,’ explains Manzano. A move worth a slow-motion replay. It’s 2 November 2003 in the old Benito Villamarín stadium in the 40th minute. Atlético midfielder Jorge crosses the ball towards the centre. Torres, in a yellow ‘away’ strip, runs, loses his marker, neutralises the defender and lets fly. It’s an artistic action, harmonious and elegant, filled more with agility than energy. It compares to a cat lazily stretching its paws one in front of the other, like an exhibition performance of karate. Thanks to his soaring leap, Fernando touches the ball with the tip of his foot and
directs it between the opposite post and crossbar. A goal of cinematic quality.
