Fernando Torres is not a time-traveller

I don't read much baseball - the odd seminal work like Moneyball, usually - but I make a habit of reading Lookout Landing, the SB Nation coverage for my local major league team, the Seattle Mariners.  Check it out - it's intelligent and funny stuff.

Hot on the topic of now ex-Mariner Chone Figgins trending on Twitter last week (after rumours of his long-impending demise proved true), the Landing's lead blogger Jeff Sullivan came up with the following statement to describe the serial underperformer:

I don't think 2009 Chone Figgins is ever coming back, because 2009 is one way in time and we go the other way and things that happened before often don't happen again. In sports, anyway. 

Does this remind you of anyone? It certainly did for me - so much so that even the dates match.

2009 harkens back to Fernando Torres' last season in his pomp at Liverpool and given the current state of affairs at Chelsea, Sullivan has once again proved remarkably prescient. Whether Roman Abramovich employed Rafa Benitez with the primary aim of helping Torres rediscover his form or simply because there are no more "names" available to him matters little; as Sullivan so rightly described  Figgins, Torres has been so out of form for so long that any last semblance the Fernando Torres of 2004-2009 has become only the fodder for pleasant Kop memories.

The player who once was Fernando Torres - the only man in England to give Nemanja Vidic nightmares - just doesn't exist any more.  He is an echo to a bygone age.