Torres: An Intimate Portrait of the Kid Who Became King

as coach, along with Ivan, the brother of Alexis. Squatting down in front are Alejandro, Dani, Rici, Rocha and Alvarito.’
    He describes Fernando at eight years old: ‘Physically very thin, very blond, with loads of freckles. He looked English. As a person he was the typical leader, the leader of the gang, very mischievous and very shy.’ How is it possible to be shy and a leader? ‘Amongst us, he was the extrovert, he ruled the roost, he spoke for everyone else. In the park, when we all ran off because some neighbour got angry and shouted at us, he stayed behind to argue and defend our right to play there. But with people he didn’t know, he put his head down and said nothing. Apart from with the girls, of course. He really had an eye for them. You’d always see him with one from school or from the local area. To be blond and have the air of a leader, the girls really liked that.’ And being mischievous? ‘For Fernán, like all of us in the gang – we were some twenty-odd kids with three or four years age difference between us – we liked to play jokes such as ringing the door entry phone bells on houses in the neighbourhood and then running away. Typical pranks like that.’

And football-wise?
     
    ‘He was the same as he is now – a star. He was playing Number 9 and he had the ability to go past the opposition and score loads of goals in every game. When things weren’t going well and we couldn’t score, we’d give him the ball to sort things out. I remember once, against Colegio Valle Inclán (school), we won 24-0 with him scoring eleven on his own. Juan wanted to substitute him to give some of the others a chance but he wouldn’t have any of it. He wanted to keep going and pile on the goals. That’s what he liked doing.’

Juan takes up the story:
     
    ‘It’s true to say that if he was taken off then he would be really angry. ‘I’m taking you off for being a bully,’ I told him, ‘you’ve got eleven goals. That’s enough.’ Treating it as a joke like that, it worked. I remember him once leaving the field crying uncontrollable tears of happiness. And what was the problem? He’d wanted to come off because he hadn’t been able to get a goal and the score was 0-0. He’d tried everything but it just wasn’t possible. He was beside himself. It was the only time he asked me to substitute him. I told him to stay on and in the end he scored. In the 1992– 93 season, Fernando got no less than 80 goals and during the three years he was with Mario’s Holanda, we won all our league games. We were champions in everything. And everywhere we were followed by loads of people – fathers, mothers, brothers, friends. We were one big family.’

Javier elaborates:
     
    ‘To tell the truth, we did in fact have two defeats but they were friendlies. The first was at Navalcarnero, just before the start of the league season and the other against a group of girls – who were bigger than our lot. They gave us a real hiding and we left the pitch in complete silence, with our pride wounded. It was the first time we’d played in a closed sports hall on a wooden parquet surface. We were used to cement. Just about all the school indoor football pitches in our area were cement. We weren’t a school team though and we didn’t have anywhere to train either, so we used what everyone here calls the Plaza Blanca (White Square), a hard area above a car park where, every time there was a match, we had to find something that we could use for a goal. Or sometimes we used the playing area of the Colegio Francisco de Quevedo, which was Fernando’s school. We used to train one or two days a week with a match on the Saturday morning. Afterwards, all of us went to the cafetería and they invited us for Coca-Cola and crisps. We ended up throwing everything around and then we ran outside to play football again in the Parque Granada.’

So there was a lot of football at that time, then?
     
    ‘Absolutely’, continues Javier. ‘There was no Playstation, Nintendo, consoles, or video games – or 1,001 TV channels. So in the evening, after homework, we went outside, together with our nocilla (a hazlenut and chocolate spread) sandwich. We would sit in front of the local chemist and decide what to do – football, bottle tops, spinning tops, picture cards and marbles were our favourites. We played football in every possible space – in the Plaza Blanca, the street behind the school and between one building and another