Torres Read online

  Talking of that, how did he get on with his team-mates?

  ‘Very well. Even though some of them were two or three years older than him, he was always competing at a higher age level. I remember a team dinner after winning the league. They were all grown-up by then and everyone wanted to go out on the town. I smiled to myself at Fernando, the youngest of them and his refusal to let himself be led astray. He was very responsible and knew how to behave – both at a party like that and in the dressing room. He didn’t put on any airs. He was always talking about the team and encouraging the others. He was very humble but at the same time very mature for his age. He would listen when you explained something to him or commented on something he was doing wrong that he should improve.’

  He didn’t want to put on any airs but he was captain of Atlético at just eighteen years of age …

  That’s true. But you have to remember when he joined the first team. He came on the scene at a time when the team wasn’t doing well. He was a lad who came from the junior Spanish national side, which had won the Under-19 European Championship, who brought a breath of fresh air to the squad and who, in a few years, had transformed himself into the public face of the club.’

  With all the criticism that brought with it …

  ‘They criticised him for the results, for the missed goals, for the side’s bad run but also for his technique – his poor left leg, his lack of control and inability to lose his marker.’

  And what does his former coach say now? Has he improved?

  ‘Now he plays much better off the ball, he knows how to lose his marker and when he gets going, he’s unstoppable. He’s a modern striker in the true meaning of the word. He’s complete, fast, can apply pressure and is a good finisher. He can use both his legs and his head. He doesn’t have the class of Van Basten, the technique of Ronaldo, or the elegance of Ibrahimovic, nor is he unbalanced like Messi, but he scores a lot of goals – and really good ones too. He works for the team and has a drive to be the best, which takes him where he has to be. He knew how to overcome his limitations using character and nerve.’

  And the human side? Has that changed?

  ‘No. He’s still the lad I knew here in Atlético. Last year, I met him in Liverpool, where I’d gone to see Rafa Benítez, and he was as warm and generous as he he’d always been. There was none of the ‘I’m a star’ who’s forgotten his friends or a junior trainer like me.’

  Chapter 9

  The Torres generation

  ‘Vamos a quemar el pueblo.’ (‘We’re going to paint the town red.’) Wrapped in the Spanish flag, a seventeen-year-old youth is threatening to disturb the peace of Sunderland’s 177,000 inhabitants. And team-mates, parents and Spanish fans are ready to join him. The youngster has just won the Under-16 European Championship, he is on a high and wants to party. It is the afternoon of 6 May 2001, and Fernando Torres is leaving the main gate at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, where Spain has beaten France in the final. There are celebrations everywhere, on the pitch, in the stands and in the dressing room. The youngsters are in a daze as they pass round the cup presented to them by UEFA President Lennart Johansson. They aren’t sure what to do. One of them runs wildly round the pitch with a pirate-style headband, another uses the Spanish flag as a kind of cape in front of an imaginary bull, while several others leap over the edge of the pitch in tears to embrace mothers and fathers who have come for the occasion. Training staff, players, parents and friends join together to form a giant human fir cone. They all shout: ‘Campeones!!! Campeones!!!’ (‘Champions!!! Champions!!!’) over and over again until they’re hoarse. Torres the goalscorer, still can’t take in the fact that it is all really happening. He shouts: ‘We are the champions!’

  It’s his first trophy with the national team, an adventure that began on 5 April 2000, in Badajoz (south-west Spain), when he wore the shirt of the Spanish Under-15 side. It was a friendly against Belgium, which they win 4-1, including Torres’ first goal in the red of Spain. A knee injury had stopped him playing in the preliminary rounds of the tournament but on 24 February 2001, he took to the field with the Under-16s in the Algarve Tournament. The opponents were England, Finland and Portugal. Spain notched up two wins and a draw against the hosts with a four-goal booty for the lad from Atlético Madrid’s junior team – the best score of the tournament. Not bad for someone coming back from an important injury, which had put into doubt his future career. It was the test that Under-16 coach, Juan Santisteban, and Iñaki Sáez, the coordinator of all the junior sides, had needed. Soon afterwards came the naming of the national side for the European championship, which would take place in England from April to May.

  Durham is the team’s base, where the youngsters lead a cloistered existence: training followed by a siesta from 3.30 to 6pm, homework with private teachers (because when many of them get back to Spain, they will have to take school exams) followed by more study and videos, this time of their next tournament opponents – a strict regime. Spain is placed in Group A, which journalists and commentators name the ‘group of death’, with Romania, Belgium and Germany the teams they have to beat to get to the quarter-finals. The aim is to repeat the performance that saw them win the title in 1999. The first match is on 24 April against Romania and the result is 3-0 to Spain with Torres, wearing Number 14, scoring his first goal on English soil. Who knows, maybe a premonition of what would happen six years and a few months later …

  After this game, the side is top of the group on goal difference. They play their next match against Belgium who, surprisingly, have beaten the Germans 2-1. It finishes as few were expecting, with a 5-0 scoreline in favour of Spain, including a double from El Niño, although no one yet calls him that. The last group game against Germany is to be played at Durham. For the boys in red, a victory or draw would see them through, although even a defeat would be enough because they have a three-point lead over their German rivals. The result is a bad 0-2 defeat but it’s enough for them to progress. However, Santisteban’s youngsters lose playmaker Andrés Iniesta through injury.

  The quarter-finals are against the Italian side of Paolo Berrettini. It’s a difficult encounter against an experienced team with good players like Giampaolo Pazzini (today a leading goal-scorer with Sampdoria), Alberto Aquilani (now in the Roma midfield) and Giorgio Chiellini (a defender with Juventus). In the 26th minute, a Torres penalty gives Spain the lead, but on 54 minutes Mauro Bellotti heads in an Italy free-kick. The scoreline is still the same at full-time and qualification for the semis will be decided from the penalty-spot. Juan Santisteban can’t bear to watch this Russian roulette and takes refuge in the dugout. But the Spaniards are unforgiving. Fernando Torres, Senel, Carlos and Melli all score, while the Italians slip up. Their first hits the post and the fourth is saved by Miguel Ángel Moya. This time luck goes their way, unlike on the previous five occasions. Santisteban is finally able to open his eyes and runs to embrace his team. It’s a story that will be repeated in another European tournament, the big one, that of 2008. A coincidence, of course …

  The last hurdle before the final is Croatia, a match that takes place in Middlesborough on 3 May. Torres opens and closes the scoring (with a goal from Senel in-between) and even allows himself the luxury of a chip from the edge of the area, in very little space, which crashes against the angle of crossbar and post. ‘We had a great second half, really impressive. We got ourselves to 3-0 and after that we just kept on moving it around, playing football, which is what we like,’ explains the lad from Fuenlabrada.

  France, the overwhelming favourites, are waiting in the final, having scored a tournament tally of seventeen without conceding any – a track record of impressive proportions. In order of matches played, they had dispatched Scotland (3-0), Croatia (3-0), Finland (5-0), Russia (2-0) and England (4-0) in the semi-final. ‘They’re a footballing machine but we will try to give them a game,’ says Santisteban. Much more optimistic is Fernando: ‘Of course they are an amazing team but if we get on with playing f
ootball, we will win.’ In their Durham base the day before the match, they follow a similar routine to that of previous days, apart from the presence of the senior national team coach, José Antonio Camacho. Then lunch, siesta, homework with a private teacher and, before going to bed, videos for everyone. The France-England game makes the youngsters realise that Les Bleus are a tough, physical, tactical and technical outfit. The game proves it. In the second minute, in front of the French keeper, Torres has a good chance but the shot goes just outside the left post. It is an open match and even if the Spanish manage at times to impose their game during the second half, it is the French pair, Le Tallec and Sinama, who get closest to scoring. But just when the 20,000-strong crowd inside the Stadium of Light are almost resigned to the prospect of extra-time, English referee Andrew D’Urso blows his whistle and awards a penalty following a tackle in the area by France’s Colombo. The decision is hotly contested by the French players but a spot-kick it is.

  It is minute 36 of the second half with just four more remaining (junior matches are 80 minutes). Fernando Torres moves towards the penalty area. He has already taken two from the spot in this tournament and converted them both. No one has any doubts about how he is going to hit it – hard and towards the left post, like the other two. There is no reason to change, given that the other two have been so successful. He takes a short run-up and shoots hard. Keeper Chaigneau guesses right but the angle of the shot is too much and he can’t reach it. It is the winning goal and the Atlético player cries out like a man obsessed, lifting his shirt to reveal a message to Andrés Iniesta and thereby keep the promise he made to dedicate his goal to his injured team-mate. Then the youngsters’ exuberant celebrations – first in the Stadium of Light and then, that evening, at the Newcastle ground, St James’ Park, where the gala dinner is being held with officials from UEFA, the Spanish Football Federation and their opponents. From shorts to jacket and tie, handshakes, friendly chat, dancing, polite laughter and toasts with Coca-Cola. It’s all done very seriously ‘because then,’ explained one of the team, ‘they cannot say that we don’t know how to behave ourselves in society.’ The partying relocates in the early morning to Durham, the team base. The Under-16s have, for once, got permission to stay out until the small hours. It is, after all, their big day and the technical staff say they deserve it. As indeed they deserve the full attention of the media, which, during the previous week, has discovered what it was already describing as ‘the Torres Generation’. The reason is quickly apparent: Fernando is the slayer of France with seven goals, the top goalscorer and the best player of the tournament. It’s Fernando who comes to symbolise a national side made up of Iniesta, Gavilán, Melli and Diego León.

  This is a generation the commentators hope will continue in the same vein, will make the senior national side and win those trophies that have eluded them so long. Meanwhile, the stories of who these seventeen-year-olds are, and where they come from – especially Torres – are being uncovered. The first background articles appear in the press on the lad from Fuenlabrada, whose physique and strength someone compares to a sabre, with others recalling idol, Marco Van Basten, his favourite singers (Andrés Calamaro) and films (Roberto Benigni’s La Vita è Bella).

  A little more than a year later, the Torres Generation will repeat the celebrations in Norway. In-between, there was the black hole of the Under-17 World Cup, which took place in September 2001 in Trinidad & Tobago. Spain arrived, fresh from their European triumph, but two bad defeats against Burkina Faso (0-1) and Argentina (2-4) left them in third place in their group and they did not make the quarter-finals. Fernando got just one goal – in the first half of the match against Oman. But he came back with a vengeance in July in the second leg of the Under-19 Euro qualifying tie against Macedonia. He scored two goals to qualify the side for the finals in Norway from 21–27 July 2002.

  José Camacho, the manager of the senior national side, decided to quit after Spain’s exit from the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan (at the hands of joint host South Korea, managed by Guus Hiddink). On 2 July, the Spanish Football Federation appointed Iñaki Sáez as his successor, but before getting down to work with the grown-ups, he wanted to finish the job with the juniors: ‘I had taken them through to qualification, so I wanted to go with them to the finals,’ he says, now retired from the Federation. After a long round of golf and a restorative shower in his holiday home in Tenerife, he talked with pleasure about that July in Norway and Fernando Torres: ‘The year before, he had made his debut with Atlético Madrid’s first team and with Luis Aragonés as manager. That season, he had been important for getting the team promoted to the Primera División. He was very good and stood out because of his speed and strength, qualities which, at that age, always create problems for opponents. He was full of promise – a youngster who’d always scored a lot of goals in all the leagues he’d played in. One could see that he had a lot of potential and that there was still room to improve various aspects of his game. Our objective, as coaches of the national team, was to improve how he received the ball with his back to his opponent and to play it as quickly as possible. In other words, that he would be able to use to the full the enormous skills that he had. In the dressing room, he was a very cheerful lad, an important person. He symbolised the attack and his team-mates had confidence in him because he always got them out of trouble. He got on tremendously well with Iniesta and you could see this on the pitch. And I saw it in the final.’

  But staying in chronological order, there were three more matches to play before arriving at the final. The first, a Group A tie against the Czech Republic, finished 1-1. Fernando is not on the score-sheet. In the second, Iñaki’s youngsters find themselves up against the hosts – a straightforward game because the Norwegians, apart from honest effort, commitment and a competitive spirit, don’t put up much resistance. The first goal comes in the 22nd minute, when the keeper can only parry Torres’ rocket of a shot and José Antonio Reyes (later of Arsenal) is on hand to pick up the loose ball and score. Nine minutes after the restart, Iniesta feeds Fernando, who beats Larsen to make it 2-0, with Reyes scoring again in the 68th minute to close the proceedings at 3-0. In the last match they meet Slovakia, who had put five past the Czech Republic and scored another five against Norway to give them a maximum six points and make them the highest-scoring team in the tournament. The only result that will see Spain through to the final is a win.

  However, things start going wrong almost immediately. A free-kick on the edge of the area and Cech finds the back of the net off the left-hand post: 1-0. Then, just before the interval, Sergio equalises, thanks to a calamitous error by Konecny, one of the opposing defenders who fails to clear. Then, in the second half, Torres takes to the stage and, in injury time, diverts a superb cross from Carmelo into the net to make the final score 3-1 to Spain, who make the final. There they will meet Germany, managed by Uli Stielike – someone who knows Spanish football well. During the 1977–78 season, after spending four years at Borussia Mönchengladbach, he joined Real Madrid to become a pivotal figure in the midfield, remaining there for eight seasons. The Spaniards hold him in high regard and he has much respect for his opponents.

  He recognises that Spain has players with better technical skills than his, and the trio of Torres, Iniesta and Reyes give him concern: ‘They are very good from the midfield to the front line and very skilful on the ball,’ he explains. Iñaki’s assistant, Santisteban, picks out the same players: ‘Iniesta directs the play as if he has had years of experience, Reyes creates all sorts of problems, and Torres? Well, I think he’s amazing, He can cover a huge amount of ground, he’s courageous, smart with the ball at his feet, skilful and ready to create space between defenders and not be afraid. If he gets a kick he gives three back and won’t give way. He’s not frightened of physical contact, is always willing to have a go and has a winner’s mentality. He knows he’s good, what he can achieve, and that conviction makes him similar to players like Raúl – strong characters
who don’t give up.’

  Santisteban, also an ex-Real Madrid player, is confident about the result of the final because ‘the lads have talent, class and self-discipline’. The match takes place on 28 July in Oslo’s Ullevaal Stadium in front of a sold-out crowd, 16,000-strong.

  This was what the Spanish newspaper El Mundo had to say the day after the encounter: ‘Germany had to face the facts and admit defeat when confronted with the generation of Fernando Torres, icon and beacon of the Spanish side, the star emerging from his shell, who intimidates his opponents and achieves success every time he plays. He was top-scorer in the European Under-16 championship-winning side and a year later repeated the trick with the Under-19s. He already looks mature enough to forget playing with the kids and take on the challenges of the grown-ups.’

  Another newspaper, ABC, had the headline: ‘Torres runs riot against Germany’ and wrote ‘Crone and Volz (two of the German defenders) couldn’t avoid him. They were met by El Niño in every Spanish attack and couldn’t catch him. Fernando had already destroyed them in the first minute. He got himself in front of Haas and shot wide after running six metres held by Fathi, who gave away a penalty, which referee Ceferen did not give. From that moment on, Fathi didn’t want to know about Torres. Torres, though, definitely did want to know all about being crowned Under-19 champions and had another penalty shout – Crone tackled him as he entered the penalty area – but the referee didn’t agree with that one either. Third time lucky. The crafty Reyes took a quick free-kick and the Atlético Madrid player took the opportunity once more to escape the weak opposition defence and shoot, forcing Haas into the first of a series of impressive saves and in turn making himself Spain’s principal problem.’