Nice guy Morata searching for hard edge to step into Costa’s long, dark shadow

AUGUST 15, 2016, was a day of high emotion for Alvaro Morata. Surrounded by his close family and friends, flanked by Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, Morata was returning to the club where it all began. “You’ve come home,” Perez told him.

Having already left once, and spent two years at Juventus, everything now seemed to be falling into place. “Here I am again,” Morata said through the rising tears. “To give my everything, as I’ve always done at the Bernabeu, and try to stay here as long as possible.”

Eleven months later, Real sold him to Chelsea. And if Morata’s second return to Madrid was drenched in pathos, his second departure was anything but.

“Goodbye without tears,” declared one prominent Madrid blog. For a club that had just won the La Liga/Champions League double, £58million was not a bad price for what was essentially a back-up striker. All of which fed into a perception that has followed Morata throughout his career: technically excellent, but lacking that final ingredient, the spark of fury that turns the great players into immortals.

That he was perhaps just a little too nice. “Sometimes in football,” one former team-mate of Morata’s said, “you have to be more of a b ***** d. And he’s not.”

What makes all of this not only highly interesting, but highly relevant, is the man he is replacing at Chelsea. Nobody would ever accuse Diego Costa of needing to be more of a b ***** d. And it is difficult to imagine a more different character to the blue-collar Costa than Morata: the sensitive, worldly, middleclass boy who turned down a potential tennis career to take his chances in the shark tank of the Real academy.

That he made it clearly suggests he is made of more than simply talent. But to get the best out of Morata, you need to show him a little tenderness.

LOVED

“He’s a man who has to feel at ease,” his father Alfonso has said. “Like every human being, he has to feel loved.”

Morata is certainly not short of love at the moment. He married his partner Alice over the summer, and since moving to England they have eschewed the leafy suburbs of Surrey in favour of a city life, taking up residence in a luxury riverside apartment in Battersea.

On the pitch, he has started strongly, with three headed goals in his first four games. And yet, as Chelsea prepare to host Arsenal tomorrow, the shadow of Costa lingers still, even as Chelsea’s poet-in-exile continues to sit on his sofa in Brazil watching television.

Arsenal are arguably the team Costa loved riling more than any other. And while Morata may easily replace Costa’s goals, what remains to be seen is whether he will be able to replace his relentless aggression. Chelsea’s last two titles, under Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, were built to a large extent on Costa’s dirty work up front: chasing the ball down into the corners, holding it up to occupy defenders. Costa epitomised a team not afraid to win with a snarl.

Technically as well as temperamentally, Morata is a different sort of striker: a spacefinder, a fine header of the ball who does not mind contact but would prefer to avoid it. And so here is the rub: can Morata, the nice boy from the comfortable background, summon that same simmering anger that turned Costa into one of the Premier League’s least-liked opponents? And if not, how do Chelsea adapt?

“Don’t forget Alvaro is very young,” said Conte yesterday. “I think he can improve a lot. We are trying to work very hard with him, to adapt him into our style, our idea of football. For me, the striker is very important. But he is a good guy and he wants to improve a lot.”

In a way, you could describe Morata as an incurable romantic. His Instagram feed is one long stream of smushy paeans to his new wife.

He laments the overcommercialisation of the game in interviews. His tearful return to Madrid was no doubt driven by sentiment as much as anything.

And yet, perhaps his ultimate failure to establish himself there can fuel the next chapter in his career.

What happens when the best club in the world, the club you call home, lets you go? What sort of scar does that leave? And how far will you go to avenge it?

Chelsea fans, you suspect, are dying to find out. (© Daily Telegraph, London)

Chelsea v Arsenal, live, tomorrow, Sky Sports, 4.0