Once a Red Warrior, Fernando Torres now has the bite of a poodle

By Mike Walters

Published 20:08 12/09/10

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On the Mersey beat, the natives are growing anxious.

Those Texas rangers are still in charge of Liverpool, with no sign of an imminent takeover, and Fernando Torres is still more than a bottle of blonde-rinse and a hairband short of his best.

When Sky Sports pundit Jamie Redknapp, a celebrated dweller of fences, lambasts the Kop’s darling as “diabolical” and “sloppy” during his half-time debriefing, there must be something badly wrong.

Can you hear the drums, Fernando? This is not a deranged pastor threatening to burn the Koran on 9/11, or a bluenose with axes to grind or private agendas to settle. This is Son of Harry, who would never knowingly say boo to a goose in case he gets his collar felt by the RSPCA.

But when Torres is a pedestrian, almost a passenger, in a public celebration of misplaced passes, we are entitled to ask what’s up with the conquistador of old.

Harsh as it may seem to criticise a World Cup winner and a European champion, it is better to lance the boil now than to ignore the elephant in the room any longer.

To tell the truth, Torres has not regained his swagger since a knee operation at the back end of last season and he looked off the pace in South Africa, so we must cut him some slack.

But as he pottered amiably through a blank sabbath in the Midlands with the menace of a poodle where a pit-bull’s snarl was in order, none of the lengthening shadows across the pitch could match Liverpool’s shadow of a talisman.

Torres snatched at a couple of half-chances, and might have won a first-half penalty under Roger Johnson’s challenge, but it took him 82 minutes to run at the Birmingham defence with a sense of purpose, like a man on a mission.

Of course, the Spaniard was not personally responsible for the suffocating tedium of Liverpool’s multiple forays up blind alleys at St Andrews.

Cut Steven Gerrard and he bleeds pure red - he had to prove as much after Barry Ferguson’s stray elbow left him with a cut around his ear - but nothing went right for the England captain yesterday.

“Where were you in Africa?,” chimed the Jasper Carrott tendency. Er, stuck out on the left wing, actually.

The missing persons bureau in Brum would have been better served concentrating their searches on Lucas Leiva and Maxi Rodriguez, whose combined creative input was more anonymous than Clint Eastwood’s high plains drifter, the Man With No Name, in classic spaghetti westerns.

The corresponding fixture five months ago effectively marked the end of the Benitez era at Anfield.

It wasn’t the withdrawal of Torres, long before the end of a 1-1 draw, which signalled that Rafa the gaffer had given up on a top-four finish, nor the plodding banality of Liverpool’s football.

It was Gerrard’s pained expression towards the bench, somewhere between bewilderment and exasperation, which gave the game away.

And last night, as Liverpool smuggled a barely-deserved point back up the M6, once again the plaintive looks were all etched across scouse brows.

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