there was a story i heard about him losing a lot of confidence and being criticized while at juve and Buffon was able to coach him out of it. it was talked about as a learning experience. i do think him having the pressure of being THE guy has been hard on him, and he also mentioned that he shouldn't have tried playing through the back pain he was having over the winter. so there are some extra factors here for sure. but no doubt he has the talent. but i think he also resorted to falling over and complaining a little too much. which i'm hoping that will go away, and there was a moment during the burnley game that he was really fighting to get through a challenge from a defender that was dragging him down by his shirt which i thought was encouraging. what clear to me though is both Hazard and Morata look better when there is a third attacker to help draw defenders. we need another pacy attacker to play on the right that has elite level qualities to spread the threats around.
I'm definitely not ready to pull the plug on Alvaro yet. First half of the season he was strong and though he is in a slump right now, I am confident he'll be fine to start next season. Tough to say what's in his head right now but he did go through some personal trauma in late Jan and impossible to know what he's going through. He was on a run of a few games goalless before then sure but as a team we couldn't muster up many attempts anyway. We see more and more stories about players being depressed or low years after the fact and we react en masse as though they have some magic wand because they are good at kicking/heading a ball, but it's more complicated than that. I hope we try the two striker experiment more because I thought that caused them problems yesterday and Morata played his part in that. Also, I was glad he was pissed off when subbed, he should be and shows he isn't a completely empty vessel going through the motions. He'll want to get better and I see quality there, just a loss of belief for whatever reason.
I too am not writing off Morata just yet and he is looking sharper now and his back problem obviously took its toll. However he is having trouble converting the chances he is creating. I am not sure it is confidence as if he was lacking confidence he could have squared the ball for an easy tap in for Giroud (I think). Instead he trusted himself to take on the shot. He just missed it. He might have been better going for the other corner but that is easy for me to say. I just long for the days of Jimmy he would not miss a chance like that.
Drogba 1st season: 41 appearances, 16 goals Morata 1st season: 44 appearances, 15 goals We won the league in Drogba's first year. That has a way of giving strikers the benefit of the doubt; so does having one of the best PL defenses ever assembled.
It wasn't our best performance but we won. I'm just happy to see us in a final considering how poor the season has been as a whole. Giroud is really pretty good. His dribbling on that goal was nuts.