Filed under: Chelsea, Liverpool, Football
Back in September 1992, in the very early days of the Premier League, Graeme Souness's Liverpool travelled to Ron Atkinson's Aston Villa. The match was a mini-classic. Liverpool opened the scoring through Mark Walters, a couple of minutes before half-time, but the side were on their way down. Villa, meanwhile, were on the up: they would challenge for the title in this season, and would announce their arrival on the scene in this match. Dean Saunders equalised within a minute, and scored another in the second half as Villa ran out 4-2 winners.There were plenty of sub-plots. Saunders had just been sold to Villa by Liverpool, so this proved sweet revenge. Also in the Villa ranks was Ray Houghton, recently departed from Anfield, and former Liverpool full back Steve Staunton, both winners of championship medals while wearing red. Their success at their new club - and Villa's development into a team capable of making a tilt for the big prizes - snapped the travails of Souness's Liverpool into sharp relief. Champions only two years previously - and seemingly perennial champions at that - Liverpool had been spectacularly knocked off their perch by Arsenal and Leeds (sorry, Fergie) and, thanks to Souness's incessant tinkering, were now a sorry wreck of a side.
In that Liverpool team trounced by Villa: David James, Torben Piechnik, David Burrows, Mike Marsh, and Don Hutchison. Recently sold by Souness: Peter Beardsley, Steve McMahon, Barry Venison. On the sidelines: Paul Stewart, Michael Thomas. It's a fascinating snapshot of a club in meltdown. Liverpool have yet to properly recover.
And yet despite all this back story, this game is now remembered for one moment, and one moment alone. This was Saunders' match, no mistaking, but nowadays only poor Ronnie Rosenthal gets a mention. For of course, this was the game in which the Liverpool striker faced an open goal only to twang the crossbar instead, the ball ricocheting out to safety as the crowd gasped and guffawed.
But here's the thing: in the contemporary reports, Rosenthal's miss was treated as nothing more than an afterthought. In The Guardian, the venerable David Lacey only mentioned it towards the end of the 12th paragraph. There were only 14 paragraphs in his report. The Independent waited until the eighth paragraph - "the miss of this or any season," was their concise reading of the situation - but, like The Guardian, concentrated on the plight of Liverpool in general terms, rather than obsessing on Rosenthal's moment of woe.
Compare and contrast that to the way Fernando Torres's abysmal miss at Old Trafford on Sunday has been reported. The media have gone to town on his clanking buffoonery. That it was the top line of several reports was understandable - while not quite a turning point in the match, a second goal for Chelsea would have set up a spectacular closing ten minutes - yet nevertheless slightly strange given the wider themes: United's best start to a season since their ill-fated 1986 campaign, the first signs of a more dynamic Chelsea emerging under the yoke of Andre Villas-Boas, a strange end-to-end thriller that on another day could have ended in a four-goal victory for either team. Torres's miss was merely a small part of a tumultuous match.
You don't need that degree in rockets to work out why folk are so eager to point and laugh at Torres: he's the most expensive player in the land, a £50m striker who has been signally unable to locate the barn, never mind the door, since joining Chelsea from Liverpool. That he finally scored his second goal for the club in his 19th league game, only to subsequently blast over from ten yards before shanking that chance wide left of an open net, beggared belief. Falls from grace followed by redemption is a well-established narrative arc; an immediate second phase of haplessness takes us into uncharted waters. It's a story tailor-made for mockery, the stock-in-trade of fans of football, hubris and schadenfreude.
And yet it completely distorts the whole picture. Ifs and ands, and all that, but Torres was by any measure the best player on the pitch at Old Trafford. His finish for Chelsea's goal was exquisite, a flick home at high speed, the first glimpse we've had of the real Torres since his 2008-09 season with Liverpool. His shimmy and shake to bust into the box, ahead of his first miss, was world class, an outstanding example of carving a chance out of thin air. His sashay just ahead of his open-goal shame was textbook, leaving David de Gea totally flummoxed. And, whisper it, that miss wasn't even that bad; just wide of the target, with his weaker foot, on slippy turf.
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