Settling In

How long was it before you started calling your mother in law by her nickname or mum?

How long was it before your work colleagues found out about your personal life?

How long before those plants in your garden were settled and flowering?

How long before you could confidently use your mobile phone?

I’m guessing that none of the answers to the above was within 734 minutes? That’s how long it took our very own Fernando Torres, all £50 million pounds of him, to find the back of the net for us.

So the questions above in my humble opinion he beat us all and at the same time had to form new relationships with team mates and also a new manager, he may well have even planted new flowers in his garden in London, but my point is I for one wouldn’t have minded if we had to wait a little longer for his first goal in the royal blue shirt.

Chelsea’s number 9 has had an immense amount of pressure placed on him through (again in my opinion) no fault of his own due to that £50 million price tag. What people, mainly outside of the club and those wearing red fail to understand, is that its not the player who decides how much he is worth, it’s generally the selling club, in this case L****Pool .

You cannot go into a supermarket and say to the checkout operator that you don’t feel that the cost of a loaf of bread is correct or over priced, you have to accept what the price is and buy if you want it. Does anybody really think this type of pressure would have occurred if L****pool had decided that the price for Fernando was say £10million, I think not.

My problem is that; with such a price tag attached, this pressure will never leave him. Take Shevchenko for example, people to this day still talk about what a flop he was and compare Torres (unfairly) to him! Shevchenko scored a few goals and still was considered a flop, but he worked hard for the team when he was on the pitch and I for one prefer players to work their bits off for our club, not just scoring goals but also tracking back, chasing into corners and making challenges.

Unless Fernando gets a hat trick and wins man of the match awards every single game, he will still be slated for something he didn’t chose or create… A price tag!!

Does anybody outside of this club look back to 2001 and constantly bang on about how cheap and what a great deal we got with a certain Mr Lampard? I have never heard this outside of our club, reason being they all want to slate Chelsea and have a pop at every opportunity.

This brings me back to our January purchases. David Luiz cost just over half or the price of Fernando Torres and settled much quicker than his new team mate, why? Simple; the price tag is overlooked by all those Chelsea haters as it’s much easier to have a pop at Torres with the bigger number.

Believe me the only way for the pressure to be lifted permanently from the young Spanish forwards shoulders is to purchase a player who costs more than him. If we signed Messi alongside Torres in January for £80million then the pressure would have been heaped on Messi not Torres!

It’s not the amount a player costs, or his wage bill, it’s how you handle the pressure, and the bigger the price the more intense the pressure.

Sutton failed

Veron failed

Crespo failed

Mutu massively failed

Shevchenko failed

Torres…… Watch this space.