Owen Humphreys/PA Archive/Press Association Images
As Andriy Shevchenko discovered to his cost, if a player doesn’t fit the system his club is playing, he’ll always have difficulty making the most of his talents. Fernando Torres arrived at Chelsea under the worst imaginable circumstances, so finding himself slotted into a tactical system which not only didn’t suit him but seemed designed to actively negate his natural instincts only made matters worse.
At Atletico and Liverpool, the team’s tactics were designed around allowing Torres to make runs off the last defender and benefit from his teammates looking for him in space at every possible opportunity. His game was based on using his acceleration to get on the end of searching passes, either to feet or on his head, and slamming them home with predatory precision. He was at his best in high tempo games, where opponents struggled to react to the direct, rapidfire passing happening in front of them.
Chelsea, on the other hand, were used to playing with powerhouse Didier Drogba up front, a colossus around whom the team could navigate. He came deep to pick up the ball, bullied defenders and created chances for others in addition to using his physical prowess to make room for himself. Chelsea’s was a game of carefully managed build-up play, wearing opponents down with triangular passing and using the full width of the field to drag defenders out of position.
While hardly a weakling, Torres lacked the strength to perform the target man role up front that his new club’s tactics were designed to accomodate and his instinct to run onto searching forward balls through the defence was denied by the Blues’ system of keeping passes short. Where Drogba was an expert at punching holes in opposition defences, Torres only knew how to run through them, a style which his teammates did not know how to adapt to, despite their best efforts.
