Get Alex Mowatt in the Premier League right now - The Square Ball 29/9/21

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WHAT A SCREAMER

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

My favourite part of my favourite Alex Mowatt goal is one of my favourite celebrations. For the second time in a week, from stupendous distances, he’d just lashed a football into a top corner on the run. He didn’t look like he could believe it. The excitement and the pleasure was all too real. It was all disbelief.

But there’s no disbelief any more, probably not for a long time. Mowatt is over it now. He only scores bangers and he only scores them all the time, and he’s not the one who can’t believe it. It’s everyone else, the people who wrote him off, and the people who even if they accept he’s brilliant now can’t accept he can keep getting away with this. Isn’t there a limit on the number of sweetly struck long range bangers one player can score?

Not, apparently, for Alex Mowatt, who probably grew up doing the rap from No Limits as he morphed from childhood into MC Freestyle, the hedgehog haired star of many a Doncaster teen party with his tyrannical lyrical typical flow, and his cheeky winks for the girls. Now he’s a 26 year old footballer and it really is time to stop messing about and get him into the Premier League, because his goals — and his reactions to them — are wasted on the Championship.

Rob Conlon wrote here last week about Ross McCormack’s three seasons of Sky Bet domination, and a career cruelly ended without a minute of Premier League football. Some would say that was McCormack’s own fault, and there were times, when Mowatt was leaving Leeds for Barnsley and then on loan to Oxford, when they said the same about him. But swapping XScape for the dreaming spires seemed to inspire Mowatt — “Growing up as a person helped me,” he told Phil Hay in 2019, “I met good people there.” Then Daniel Stendel took him back to Barnsley, put him in central midfield, and everything started going right. In February 2019 I saw the viral video of his striding off the pitch in his Barnsley kit, telling the camera, “What a screamer that was, by me.” Confident, matter of fact, still scoring screamers. I liked this Mowatt.

I liked the old Mowatt. That Huddersfield goal, in November 2015; he’d scored one like it in midweek against Cardiff, and said later that because that flew in, he was up for trying again. Bear in mind earlier in this match Liam Cooper had been knocked out by a Scott Wootton headbutt as the pair tried to defend a corner. This was Massimo Cellino and Steve Evans’ Leeds United. Then, as I wrote in my report at the time:

…eight minutes into the second half there was a sudden outbreak of Alex Mowatt. Mowatt scored some great goals last season from exactly this range, and he scored his best yet against Cardiff on Tuesday; but he has never kicked a ball harder, truer, or with such sudden savage violence as he did on Saturday. In the celebrations Berardi knelt to polish Mowatt’s left boot; when he stood up, his hands were aflame.

Berardi’s contribution is important here. Gaetano Berardi didn’t often celebrate other people’s goals like this. He used to celebrate Rob Green’s saves, by grabbing him round the neck and shaking him. He celebrated the stoppage time turnaround against Blackburn in 2018, by grabbing Salim Lamrani round the neck and shaking him. When Stuart Dallas scored the opening goal of the ill-fated play-off second leg against Derby, while all around him were losing their heads, Berardi was shoving the celebrating Leeds players away from the Derby fans — we were going to do this decently. For his own two goals, Berra happily charged about the place. But never else can I remember him doing the sort of celebration that might have been taken from a World Cup into a console game, except when Mowatt scored this goal, and Berra was straight out with the fake boot polish.

Mowatt’s own reaction, though, is why I never tire of watching this goal; it’s the second whip of his head, when he goes from not believing it, to really not believing it. But he was a kid then. He’s grown up now, been down the leagues and almost fallen down the loan system, won a promotion, captained Barnsley, got a big contract and a big move. And he keeps making the screamers happen. One earlier this season was amazing, but standard. This week’s is sublime. The technique can’t be improved, the flight of the ball is like a poem about a shooting star. And the celebration is near enough just a shrug. It’s crucial to notice that he doesn’t even watch the ball hitting the back of the net. He knows it’s going in. What a screamer that was, by him.

Especially now we’re suffering Cristiano Ronaldo and his stupid constipated dance in the so-called best league in the world, I long for Alex Mowatt to be here, banging in the screamers and striding away as if he’s just polished off a Big Mac and drop-kicked the wrapper in a bin. I want those old teen rap clips to be hauled out again on Soccer AM. I yearn for Carragher and Neville analysing his game on Monday Night Football. Could he really get in the England team, playing alongside Kalvin Phillips? Even if he couldn’t, I’d love to hear the arguments on TalkSport that he’d ‘offer something different to Bellingham’.

I know it means West Brom coming up with him, but whatever, they do it often enough anyway. But I want it for him. For those old Ross McCormack reasons. Alex Mowatt has more than proved himself in the Championship: he’s too good for it, his goals are too good for it, his celebrations are too fun for it, his humour is too dry for it. I’m not sure the Premier League will get his humour either — picture Gary Lineker’s perplexed shrugging after deciphering the Donny drawl of one of his post-match interviews — but everything else absolutely deserves to be seen at the top level. Everyone needs to stop pissing around and get Alex Mowatt in the Premier League. He’ll make the league better.

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