Torres: El Niño: My Story. Fernando Torres
aimless daydreaming. I soon discovered that the pace and intensity of first team football was far greater than anything I had been used to with the youth team. I called for the ball, I showed for it, but my team mates didn’t find me. Not, that is, until Juan Gómez made a twenty yard run and played it in to me. It was my first touch. I didn’t get very involved in the game because I was an unknown, even for my own team mates. The two most significant moments were when I controlled the ball with my back to goal and won a free-kick, and a lob that went much higher than I had intended. Atlético won 1-0 but I have never really felt part of that victory. Maybe I hadn’t yet got it into my head that I was no longer just another fan.
I was included in the squad for the next match against Albacete six days later, too. It wasn’t a huge surprise. I half expected to be included in the trip to La Mancha in central Spain because the team had picked up a lot of cards against Leganés and there were a number of players suspended. And yet at the same time I half expected to be told I could go off on holiday and switch off, not worry about the first team. The match was another do or die encounter in the battle for promotion. Atlético had won three and drawn one since Cantarero had taken over and there were three weeks left until the end of the season. I started on the bench again and came on in place of Kiko.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it is hugely disappointing that I never got the chance to actually play with my idol. I never set foot on the pitch at the same time as him and never played a single minute alongside him, although at least I can say I shared a dressing room with him and was his team-mate for a short period of time. When I went on there were seventeen minutes left and I was lucky enough to score in front of plenty of rojiblancos: the stands at the Carlos Belmonte stadium in Albacete were packed with Atléti fans. Ivan Amaya’s cross forced me to make a sideways run to throw off the defender and reach the ball. I headed it back across goal, past Valbuena, onto the post and into the net.
The victory gave us a genuine chance of promotion back to the first division with two weeks to go. We were fighting it out with Betis and Tenerife, whose coach was a certain Rafa Benítez. Everything changed for me with that goal. Suddenly, I was the star. I was surrounded by journalists and photographers. I felt like the lead role in a film until one of my team-mates, HernÁndez, rescued me from the pack. The atmosphere in the dressing room was fantastic and Kiko, who had been captain that day, came up to me and handed me the armband. ‘One day you’ll wear it on the pitch,’ he said. ‘Today, you’ve earned the right to wear it off the pitch.’ It’s a memento I will keep forever and one that takes pride of place in my house in Madrid.
A journalist once asked for an interview with me which involved taking photographs in the very centre of Madrid. Atlético Madrid’s press officer at the time said yes and called me over one day after training. ‘We’re going to do an interview and some photos in the Plaza Mayor and the Puerta del Sol,’ he told me. The Plaza Mayor and the Puerta del Sol are two of the most emblematic, and busiest, squares in the heart of Madrid.
‘Are you mad?’ I asked. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he replied, ‘no one knows who you are.’
He wasn’t wrong. It was Christmas 2001, I was seventeen and had been in the Atlético first team for barely six months. I was virtually anonymous and we did the shoot alongside the stalls that set up for Christmas in the Plaza Mayor, under the famous clock in the Puerta del Sol and with my arms around the statue of the bear and the strawberry bush—the city’s emblem and the centrepiece of Atlético’s shield. We then rounded off the day with a squid sandwich, typical of the centre of old Madrid. And there hadn’t been the slightest hassle.
A goal against Deportivo de La Coruña and then another one against FC Barcelona changed my life. I went from being just another anonymous kid to being recognised by almost everyone.
Fame comes so quickly and there is nothing you can do about it. It creeps up on you and before you know it you’re engulfed by it; suddenly, you’re thrust into the public eye.
A year after that Christmas stroll round Madrid, my name crossed borders. In four matches, I went from a virtual unknown to a player people were talking about. The goal I put past Deportivo goalkeeper José Molina, having flicked the ball over the head of Nourredine Naybet, and another strike, this time against Barcelona, having cut inside Frank De Boer and beaten Roberto Bonano with the outside of my boot, made everyone sit up and take notice. The club had to put the brakes on. Between those two matches, we faced Real Madrid and the press department had over forty requests for interviews with me. I was no longer going step by step; now I seemed to be taking off. People started to recognise me and the pressure grew. It was more and more common for me to appear on the cover of the papers and doing normal things became more difficult. Just going to eat, to the cinema, a concert or even out for a coffee became a trial. Nothing would ever be the same again.
My independence had vanished. That became clear to me during the autumn of 2004. Just after the summer holidays, I got a letter telling me that Madrid’s waxwork museum was going to make a model of me. I couldn’t understand why they wanted to put me in there alongside other figures from Spanish sport. After the measurements were done, the model was finished in October and I went along to its unveiling. I was the first Atlético player to be immortalised there. Alongside ‘me’ were Zidane and Raúl as well as a number of other sportsmen and women, like Angel Nieto, thirteen times motorcycle world champion, Miguel Indurain, five-times winner of the Tour de France, Carlos Sainz, twice world rally champion, and Arantxa SÁnchez Vicario, one of the greatest Spanish tennis players ever. There I was, a waxwork in Atlético’s centenary kit with a ball in my right hand, signed by my team mates.
Two months later, a proposal arrived from the Madrid city council. I was asked to inaugurate the city’s Christmas celebrations from the balcony of the town hall in the Plaza de la Villa, accompanied by the mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón. It was my duty to turn on the lights and read the pregón— the announcement that officially opens the Christmas period.
I was becoming overrun by events, requests and my increasing fame. So much so that my girlfriend Olalla had to start buying my clothes for me: I could only turn up at the shops if I went early in the morning on a weekday. Any other time of day was impossible; I couldn’t do something as simple as duck into a fitting room and try something on. It got to the stage that if we wanted to go to the cinema we would turn up in the dark after the film had already started so that no one would see me. We started doing that after one occasion when people had seen me go in or had noticed me sitting alongside them. At the end, loads of mobile phone messages later, there was a huge crowd of people waiting by the doors for me to come out. When I mentioned it to my team-mates in the Spain squad, the ones who played in England told that it would never happen over there.
You do get used to it and you do learn to live with fame, though. Two more events also shot me into the public eye. The first happened when I made my debut for Spain in a friendly against Portugal on 6 September 2003; the second started off as a joke but ended up becoming a big deal and making me even more
recognisable. I was eating with my friend Dani Martín, lead singer of the band El Canto del Loco, and he asked me to appear in a video alongside the actress Natalia Verbeke. It was great fun. Now when I see a video on the television I have some idea of what went into it. Not even half of what you do ends up in the video; we did so much filming and in the end it seemed so short. I was there until late one night and Dani didn’t finish until dawn. There must have been a thousand takes, but I was delighted with the final product. The same thing happened when another Spanish group, Café Quijano, came to Las Rozas to play us the song they had written to accompany the Spanish national team at Euro 2004. I was the first to leap on the stage and grab a guitar. And I can’t play a single note.
That wasn’t the only time Dani has got meinto trouble. I must confess, I went red when he called me up onto the stage during one of their concerts in Fuenlabrada. But the worst was what happened to us in a shopping centre in northern Madrid one day. I don’t even go to shopping centres often but one day I went with him to a shop that a