919 minutes. 919 minutes of football since he last scored a goal for club or country. The worst thing for Fernando Torres about that statistic, however, is that there won’t be anyone who is in the least bit surprised by it. Indeed, there are few statistics that Torres could point to to mount any sort of defence of his time at Chelsea.

In his 142 games at Liverpool he scored 81 goals, a goals per game (gpg) rate of 0.57. Taking just his Premier League games into account, that rises to 0.64gpg during his time at Anfield. Since his move in January last year, he has scored 0.12gpg in all competitions and just 0.10gpg in the Premier League. Stats of course, do not tell the full story but in this case they are quite an accurate portrait of a man failing to provide what he was signed for.

But it does beg the question – how? How has a man who once made Nemanja Vidic scared to step on the same pitch as him become a £50 million laughing stock? Given his record, particularly in the latter days of his Anfield career, one might expect to be able to point in the direction of injuries. His hamstrings are notoriously susceptible to strains and tears, yet in the year since his arrival at Stamford Bridge, he has played 42 games and been an unused substitute in many more. His longest spell unavailable for selection was down to a red card received against Swansea.

A more creditable argument might be that his confidence is simply shot to pieces. Torres, throughout his time at both Atlético Madrid and Liverpool, was always adored by the fans. That isn’t to say that Chelsea fans didn’t welcome him with open arms, and haven’t supported him throughout, but one gets the feeling that within the club it may be a different story.

Like Andriy Shevchenko, he appears to be a Roman Abramovich signing, foisted upon a coach who didn’t necessarily want or need him in the squad. He never seemed a fit for Carlo Ancelotti’s team, and I doubt it’s too much of a stretch to say that he may have breathed a sigh of relief when the Italian was relieved of his position.

The appointment of André Villas-Boas should have rejuvenated Torres. He has all the attributes to fit perfectly into the style of play that the Portuguese likes to employ, yet for all Villas-Boas’ staunch public defence of the Spaniard, he still found himself glued to the bench, rarely entrusted with a starting place, let alone the chance to play a full ninety minutes. For a man who thrives on confidence, he cannot have found much of it from the lack of trust shown in him.

Perhaps Villas-Boas has been mindful of the fact that the shape he has so far employed at Chelsea isn’t driven towards getting the best from Torres. One need only look back to his days at Liverpool to see that he was always at his best with a creative player in behind him. That enabled him to drift wide, attack the channels in between full backs and centre backs, from where he caused so many problems. In Juan Mata, Chelsea purchased perhaps the perfect player for that role behind Torres, but his fellow Spaniard has largely been stationed out on the left, taking up the positions into which Torres likes to drift.

The truth may be that there is a narrow window of parameters in which Torres works at his very best, a window which was hit perfectly at Anfield, with Steven Gerrard and Xabi Alonso sat behind him. Added to a crippling lack of confidence, which is only accentuated by ever growing scrutiny of his every move, and you arrive at a player who now seems even less likely to score than his troubled replacement at Liverpool, Andy Carroll.

The question that remains, then, is whether Torres can recapture the form that made him one of the most feared strikers in world football. To my mind, it’s extremely doubtful. There is a significant possibility that his confidence has been permanently undermined – the cliché that “class is permanent” is one of the biggest lies in sport, just ask all those who have faded into obscurity – and even were he to be put in a side geared towards getting the best from him, the sheer pressure of scrutiny that follows him may well be too much. Chelsea fans will hope that I’m wrong, but the prospect of seeing Torres back at his imperious best seems a long, long way away yet.

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