There is something in the way Álvaro Morata celebrates his goals that gives me some anxiety. Or at least in recent times, since I retained a marginal memory of him as a restrained footballer, cautious in celebrations, not at all ceremonious. His roar in Córdoba, after having missed a penalty minutes before, reminded me of distant times where the goal seemed like a chimera sent from the sky and the footballers ran from one place to another, their teammates in crazy pursuit without knowing where it all ended and with the protagonist screaming in an absolutely unconscious way, a bit like those children who protest loudly about hunger or sleep, without thinking that one day they will be in charge of taking care of another and then they will miss those lost tones due to having abused them. at the origin of the voice.
With few footballers it will have been more unfair in this country – and perhaps in others, but they are almost the same country – than with Álvaro Morata, as of this week the team’s fourth all-time top scorer and only one of a tremendous indisputable giant like Fernando Torres. 37 points illuminate a striker who, in addition to scoring, works for the team as if the food of his children depended on a kind of biblical barter: you will earn as much bread as sweat runs down your forehead. And no one runs more than Morata. Nobody bothers the rival more than Morata. Nobody explains the fundamentals of the modern center forward better than Morata.
Spain is also explained very well by the Madrid native, a star product of the Real Madrid youth team who emigrated in search of quality minutes, in search of some stripes that would allow him to return home with other merits than those of a promising Castilla attacker: Those, except for the Martian exception of Raúl, are the full sticker albums and none with the white elastic except for the open days of the preseason, the preliminary rounds of the Copa del Rey or some furious outburst from a replacement technician. Ask Eto’o, for example. But Morata did return after succeeding in the major leagues. And that was when that forced de-escalation of his prestige began in which nothing he does on the field seems to compensate for everything he causes outside.
Morata, who came on in the second half of the famous comeback in Lisbon and gave the team what Benzema was not giving them at that time, left Real Madrid through a door so back and tiny that it cannot even be said that he did so. slamming the door “I played for Madrid, but I went with my dad to the Calderón and dreamed of playing there. Unfortunately I had to play there with other shirts and not the Atleti one,” he confessed to the tennis player Fabio Fognini in an Instagram chat. The next day, some press headlines spoke of resentment, bad memory and contempt: this is how certain cobwebs are woven in Spain.
It is also very likely that Morata did not know how to manage goodbyes. Even their breakups. Social networks are a communication channel that many young footballers understand as a means of expression without having to submit to the filters of the press, but they often do not understand its risks and even minimize the dangers. Only at the end, when everything explodes into the air and the weight of gratuitous hatred becomes unbearable, do they seem to realize the wrong steps. Morata knows this well, and he will also think that it is all his fault, and it turns out that it is not.
