“It’s a good moment for me and my conscience is clear.

“I think the confidence shown by the manager and club as a whole was another great motivation for me because Liverpool are a massive club who could literally approach anyone in the world of football so to have chosen me was very special.

“I think that 23 is an ideal age to be making a move like this, I was ready and had reached a ceiling at my old club – I’d gone as far as maybe I could. I didn’t think I could give any more and I wanted to set myself new targets and new goals.

All the circumstances clicked at the same time so it was the right time for a number of reasons. I think the fact that Liverpool showed so much confidence in me and they were the only club that I really wanted to move to.

“All that happened at the same time so football-wise, in my career, it was the right time to move.”

So nobody, not even the most hardened Atletico fanatic can begrudge Torres swapping a club that is going into the Intertoto route to Europe for one that was just 90 minutes from conquering the continent for a sixth time six weeks ago.

And it’s that kind of stage that Torres is convinced he should be performing on.

He added: I want to play at the highest level, the Champions League for example. So I think it’s a very positive step forward I need to make at this time in my career.

“To be considered a truly great player you have to be playing for one of the truly great clubs and when you do play for a club like Liverpool you have a greater opportunity to progress as a player, more people see you playing, you are playing to a wider audience.”

And it’s an audience that has no need to question his commitment to the cause, as Torres’s feelings for Liverpool run much deeper than his liking for the £90,000 a week six-year deal he’s netted.

His allegiance was inadver-tently made clear during a La Liga game last season when the underside of his captain’s armband revealed a ‘We’ll Never Walk Alone’ slogan.

Torres said: “A group of my mates and I are all Liverpool fans and we have been for some years. A few years back, my friends each got a tattoo on their arm but obviously as a football player, I couldn’t really get that tattooed on my arm.

“So on my last birthday they gave me the present of the armband with it written on the underside.”

But if yesterday is anything to go by, a Liverpool tattoo to add to the current collection wouldn’t look out of place.