Chelsea poached Torres from Liverpool mid-way through a season (Picture: Getty)

Jamie Carragher has revealed he was not at all shocked that Fernando Torres failed to live up to his £50million price tag at Chelsea.

The Liverpool legend played alongside Torres – who top-scored for the Reds in three straight seasons – and witnessed first hand the Spaniard’s highs and lows at Anfield.

Chelsea forked out a British transfer record to sign Torres in January of 2011, but Carragher says he knew the forward was a shadow of his former self and that proved to be the case as he netted just 20 goals in 110 league outings.

‘I couldn’t believe it, what I mean by that was I knew we had kidded Chelsea,’ Carragher revealed on Sky Sports’ Off Script show when asked how he had reacted to Torres’ move to Chelsea.




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‘What I mean by that is I’d played with Torres, for the last 12 months, he was a shadow of his former self.

‘I think for 18 months at Liverpool he was the best striker in the world. And I think he had such a good record against Chelsea that it obviously stuck in the owner’s mind.

‘Not so much a manager because the manager changed so often at Chelsea. At that stage, Chelsea were still a club where the owner was buying players who he wanted.

Carragher faced Torres regularly after he left Liverpool (Picture: Getty)

‘I think [Andriy] Shevchenko was a similar case as well.

‘What happened for us, and was very fortunate for Liverpool, was we played Chelsea that season, we weren’t having a great season, Torres having a really poor time but he scored two against Chelsea and I think we won 2-0 or 3-0 under Roy Hodgson at Anfield.

‘And I think the decision was probably made then for Roman Abramovich, “As soon as January comes we’re going for Fernando Torres”.

‘Now £50 million was major money at that stage and we were all in a state of shock.

‘Listen, gutted that Torres was gone but I think we all knew he was never going to be the same player.

‘But we could not believe we got £50 million and we ended up doing probably something similar in some ways ourselves in buying Andy Carroll for £35 million, but we did get Luis Suarez out of it.

‘The money where Torres went we got two strikers out of it.

‘But I was not surprised at all it didn’t go well for Fernando Torres at Chelsea.’

Torres would spend four years at Chelsea but never reclaimed the form he produced at Liverpool, netting just eight times in his most prolific season for the club before rejoining old club Atletico Madrid after a loan at AC Milan.

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