I promised myself I wouldn’t waste one more keystroke on Fernando Torres’s tribulations at Chelsea; I’d have preferred to hit the snooze button and sleep right through the mess, but this is what’s making news. How far are fans willing to go? I often wonder, is it the writers or the readers who are obsessed?
What is one reader’s contemplation willing to propose? While the comment may have been partly in jest, one observer’s take on an article in the Guardian suggested that if Torres went out on the town with his teammates to “nail some of their ladies” his scoring problems may be put to rest.
Four-hundred and eighty readers, the highest number out of the 195 comments, gave this theory a “recommendation.” This is what hackneyed subject matter gets reduced to.
One may laugh the assertion off at first, then after dissecting his performances on the pitch, say his private life may be put to the test—it isn’t that far-fetched.
But I fear I’ve become what I feared—another over-analyzing writer who’s taken to beating a dead horse to death.
Not lifting the curtain on his striker’s domestic state, Andres Villas-Boas defended Torres on the CNN site regarding his misfire on Sunday against Manchester United and compared it to Rooney’s penalty gaffe, “It happened to Fernando, but it also happened to Rooney. It’s nothing dramatic.”
On the contrary, I believe it is.
Rooney and Torres are on two different planes at this point in their careers. Rooney, one should assume, has nothing left to prove. Torres, on the other hand, is being graded under a microscope.
Not to mention, Manchester United were winning 3 – 1 in the 83rd minute when Torres should have given the Blues a ray of hope to finish with a little more dignity.
And since Manchester United are the EPL’s Barcelona, Chelsea, as well as Torres, had more at stake.
I suspect if readers and writers alike refuse to speculate, Torres’s problems may simply go away—that is, until the next time we pick up the sports pages or go online.
Like any trend, writing about Torres has become fashionably in.
