Get Alex Mowatt in the Premier League right now - The Square Ball 29/9/21
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.
— Leonard (@carlleonard2) February 2, 2019
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.
Alex Mowatt. One of my favourite goals. Some of the words I'm happiest to have written. All on one handy video. #LUFC pic.twitter.com/zoA5N4SXAJ
— MoscowhiteTSB (@MoscowhiteTSB) January 27, 2017
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.
Alex Mowatt, BEHAVE! 😱😱😱
— Soccer AM (@SoccerAM) September 29, 2021
The West Brom man scored this absolute stunner of a half-volley last night 🤤 pic.twitter.com/gYinfffgZH
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.
