A Bronx Tale Of Torres: Is There A Sadder Sight In Football Than Wasted Talent?

As the half-rejuvenated, half-terrible Torres walked off the pitch on Saturday, I breathed a nervy sigh of relief. Yet the version of Torres that impressed did not evoke my feelings because my heart is blue, nor because my nuts are Spanish. Fernando Torres is slowly becoming a feared phenomenon again and, that miss aside, he is escaping what is in my opinion the worst condemnation in football: being remembered as a player who simply threw his talent away.

The game is so full of promise. Gascoigne is a fine example – a charismatic fellow indeed, yet one who simply fell in love with the game. So when the glory, the hope, the sheer substance is taken away from these players after a botched move to the wrong club or too many visits to the injury room, I simply cannot help but emphasise with them. Look at Owen – a Ballon D’or award in 2001 (which was admittedly odd) – a decade later and the bench, not the sky, is the limit.

Football is often said to be a fickle game, yet it is a fast one too. The career of a professional footballer has a life span of around just fifteen years – Torres has already lost a year and a half of that time period to injury and inconsistency. To witness the losing of season after season to losses of form and fatigue must be as annoying for the player as it is dissapointing for us.

As any footballer will tell you it’s an uphill struggle to actually make it as a professional footballer – as children they are scouted out: years are dedicated to becoming what most of us can only dream of becoming. What an anti-climax it must be then, to have your best years ripped away and the constant voice in the back of your head that you will never again get another shot of making it in such a beautiful sport.

There are thousands of footballers who earn the ridiculous sums of money we so often moan about, yet how many, right now, will be pencilled in as icons in the future, as the players who simply define the game? When one who looks as though he can become part of that sacred group withers, it’s crushing.

Not that the fall from grace is an eloquent one. The media cruelly latch onto the player and sensationalise every poor touch, every game without a goal. It’s an excruciatingly slow fall as as heads turn, the expectancy levels become unattainable: e.g. Torres’ move to Chelski had broken the British transfer record on the basis that he would soon return to his scintillating best – a heavy burden.

The legacy that looks certain to be inherited after boots are hung up slowly erodes away whereas the gnawing realisation that your reputation will be one of failed hopes comes further into focus. Parrells can be drawn from other walks of life – the late Heath Ledger, the brilliant Jim Morrison: all figures who left us with mere tasters of what they could have gone on to produce.

And to make matters worse, it’s our loss as well. If Torres falls at the second rung of the rejuvenation ladder and never makes it back to the first we will be left with a sense of emptiness – that the strong, quick, deadly predatory striker Torres was could have offered our league so much more. We pay to see players like Torres: the best in the world, naturally gifted, doing the things we can’t and indicative of a league that is alluringly beautiful.

When that is taken from us it is a lost opportunity, an unfulfilled prophecy if you will: we are cheated of the benefit of witnessing footballing genius.

A once so confident figure destabilised and lambasted is oddly disturbing. It just doesn’t seem right. Short of death and destruction, is there a sadder footballing sight than a player who fails to capitalise on the talent he has been blessed with?