Mourinho coy over Fernando Torres future

It turns out real journalists are a lot better at transcribing press conferences than bloggers, so I'll let Miguel Delaney do the quoting on the requisite Fernando Torres update:

What we have clear as a club is we need three strikers to face season. He's one. I like him as a person and player. If he wants to leave, I believe it's because he wants to try a new life, possibly a new league. If he wants to leave - and I have not heard that from him - any possibility would be analysed. At the moment, we are doing nothing, because our belief is that the market is closed enough.

In other words, he's not telling. He did hint, however, that if Torres was indeed to leave it would have to be sooner rather than later -- with the deadline coming up on Monday Chelsea would need time to source a replacement (which seems to rule out the prospect of Patrick Bamford coming in as third striker), and so the Torres business needs to be concluded one way or another as soon as possible.

There are also hints that Mourinho knows that Torres would be happier elsewhere, and he was fairly firm in his statement that Chelsea are only too happy to move on unhappy players (we are a humane club, after all), so if anyone was looking for the rumours to be dispelled, they obviously came to the wrong press conference. Nothing is confirmed (or near confirmed), but something is going on here.

The manager discussed other transfer business too, admitting that there will be at least one non-Torres outgoing player in order to fit in with Premier League homegrown regulations. As to who that might be, he's not telling, and apparently that decision won't get made until deadline day anyway. So there's at least some excitement on the horizon.