Ferrán Torres, the last tenant of the «Messi area»

Updated:05/11/2020 07:17h

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Ferrán Torres is “on fire”, as the Anglo-Saxons say colloquially. The winger, rescued by Manchester City from the Valencian maelstrom this summer for 25 million euros, has experienced a well-deserved media coverage. In just under two months, he has gone from being one of the national footballers with the greatest projection to being a regular in the calls of Luis Enrique, a role reinforced by his good work in the Premier League and by his scoring instinct in the Champions League (3 goals in 3 games). And it is that Torres has become the latest descendant of a special line of players who, under the orders of Pep Guardiola, have abandoned the loneliness of the band to play in the center of the attack.

The “false nine” is already part of the collective soccer imaginary. We do not know if the result of mythology or the palpable obsession of the Catalan coach, on May 1, 2009, as recounted in the book “Herr Pep” by Martí Perarnau, Guardiola called Messi at dawn because he had “something very important” to tell him. The next day, Barcelona received a Real Madrid that came in the league. Apparently, the coach explained to the still Barcelona player, at that time something more extreme right, that, at his signal, he was located in the center of the attack, between the midfielders and the Madrid defenders, in a kind of dead zone . The rest is history.

Torres, faced with the losses of Agüero and Gabriel Jesús, accumulated three consecutive games as a “false nine” with Manchester City, against Sheffield, Marseille and, last Tuesday, Olympiacos. The Valencian, against the Greeks and accompanied by Mahrez and Sterling in attack, was placed in the center lane, where he achieved two shots in the first ten minutes, one from the heel after a corner, to put the 1-0 at 12 with a definition between the legs of the goalkeeper. Although he did not play with the freedom that Messi’s inordinate talent allowed him in Guardiola’s Barsa, where each movement was a superiority, the Spaniard performed nine functions while running around the attack front, always with completion as a nuclear objective .

Focusing on players raised on the brink of lime has been something recurrent in Guardiola’s career as a coach, each with its own nuances. At Bayern Munich, the Catalan has already tested Ribéry, a “street” footballer, to fill this position in his first year as a coach in Bavaria. Also Müller, accustomed to Heinckes to the right-handed profile, a position in which he won a treble in 2013, played several games in that area before the arrival of the classic Lewandowski. Götze, both in Bayern and in the German team, was seen in the area regularly. Already in the City and before an Etihad emptied by the pandemic, Gabriel Jesús, theoretical point, finished on the left and it was Sterling who most inhabited the center in the round of 16 match against Real Madrid. Both scored, yes, with the complicity of Varane.

But not only the extremes have been affected by this ideology. In his last year in Barcelona, ​​with the team in need of some encouragement to avoid conformism after winning the Champions League in 2011, Cesc Fabregas, who signed in theory to continue the tradition of talented midfielders of the Catalan club (Xavi, Busquets, Thiago, Iniesta), formed during a good part of the season a kind of double point with Messi, where the Catalan achieved great scoring records (42 goals in three seasons), something that ended up being transferred to the National Team, since it was he who did striker in the final of Euro 2012. the young Foden, great English promise of City, came out a few weeks ago at halftime in the game against West Ham, in which he scored a few minutes after taking the field, also as a false nine. The position has had many names and suitors. Today, it is from Ferrán Torres.

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