My own fans abused me, claims Morata
ALVARO MORATA has described how a crippling back injury turned his dream start at Chelsea into a nightmare and led to him being abused in the street. The 25-year-old striker, who fears he could miss out on a World Cup spot with Spain, explained: ‘At the beginning I scored goals and everyone loved me but now it is different. People say things to me in the street but they don’t know what I have been through. ‘I would have preferred to have torn a muscle and been out for three months than to not know what was wrong with me. I wanted to play and keep scoring but I could not.
‘We went to see two doctors in England and they could not find the problem. We went to Germany and what happened there was very difficult.
‘I had to go several times to receive treatment and for them to inject my back. The pain was bad and then I had to go back to London to train the next day. I think that was my mistake. I should have stopped. When you are injured you are injured and that’s that.’
Morata said things took a turn for the worse just after he learned he was going to be a father. ‘‘I wanted to play but in the warm-up I couldn’t move. I asked the doctor to give me an injection. I wanted to dedicate a goal to the baby and from there I got it into my head of not wanting to stop and wanting to prove myself and everything went wrong.’
He believes playing on may have cost him his place at the World Cup. ‘I would love to go to Russia. It will be tough to be left out but I know that is a possibility,’ he said.
Morata, who could finish the season with a winner’s medal if Chelsea beat Manchester United in the FA Cup final at Wembley on May 19, is determined to make a longterm success of his move to Chelsea and is learning how to deal with the demands of the Premier League.
He added: ‘I know how the league is now and what the referees are like. In this last part of the season I am becoming their friend because that is the only way they give you fouls.
‘In the first half of the season it was crazy. I protested a lot. One of them told me that he knew it had been a foul but that he was not going to blow it. Now I go out and I know that I have to dish it out too because if not they will break me.’