What went wrong?

What happened to Fernando Torres? Peter Fraser pinpoints when the Spaniard lost his mojo.

It is one of the greatest mysteries of football - whatever happened to Fernando Torres? The striker was probably the most feared in the world during his pomp with Liverpool between 2007 and 2010. The Spaniard was a combination of pace and power - custom made for the Premier League. But now, at Chelsea, he is being deemed as simply "not good enough". Those were the words of Sky Sports' Gary Neville directed at all of Chelsea's strikers after Torres' lacklustre performance in last Monday's forgettable 0-0 draw at Arsenal, where the failure to score ensured a striker from the Stamford Bridge club did not hit the back of the net away from home in the Premier League in the entirety of 2013. It is a remarkable statistic but one which epitomises Torres' loss of form over the past three-to-four years. It is a fall from grace which, ahead of Sunday's latest reunion with Liverpool, means he has yet to score against his former club in six previous attempts having not been involved in the 2012 FA Cup final. Torres took the Premier League by storm when arriving at Liverpool from Atletico Madrid in the summer of 2007 in a £26.5million deal as a 24-year-old. He went on to score 24 goals from 33 top-flight appearances in a spectacular debut 2007/08 campaign. That season ended in him scoring the winner for Spain in the final of Euro 2008. He had also become the first Liverpool player to score more than 20 league goals in a season since Robbie Fowler in 1995/96. Likewise, he hit 33 goals in all club competitions to surpass the record set by Manchester United's Ruud van Nistelrooy and become the most prolific foreign debutant in English football. It was form which led Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard to say in the December of 2007: "Fernando is getting a lot of praise at the moment and rightly so, because the way he has settled into English football has been amazing and the way he has played is frightening. It can be difficult for players from abroad to settle into English football but, at the moment, Fernando looks like he has been playing here for years." Tellingly, though, that number of 33 appearances would be the highest total Torres would play in a single Premier League season for Liverpool. He had suffered from a groin problem in the October of 2007/08 and then a hamstring injury in the February but that was just a sign of things to come. Hamstring injuries plagued Torres into the 2008/09 campaign. He experienced one in each month of the August, October and November. Torres said of those injuries in his 2009 book, 'El Nino, My Story': "It was a real hammer blow. The first time it happens you think it is normal and you keep going. The second time, you stop, you take more care and you start to ask yourself why it happened. The third time, you stop properly, you start to investigate the underlying causes and work as hard as you can to make sure it never happens again. That was even more important in my case, because it was my hamstring that was causing me problems - the muscle I live by, the one that gives you acceleration and speed." An ankle injury also saw Torres miss two Premier League games in the February to March of 2008/09 but it was the hamstring injuries which were of greater concern given the