Gonzalo Higuain and the strange phenomenon of Strikers Who Look Sad All The Time

He didn’t actually play in the game, but Gonzalo Higuain had a lovely time at Chelsea’s League Cup semi-final against Tottenham Hotspur. Before the game he came out and waved to all his new fans; afterwards he grinned and hugged his way around the celebrations. He looked happy ...

... which is unusual. Because when Higuain is on the field in his professional capacity, togged out in shorts and shinpads, he embodies one of football’s strangest archetypes. He is The Striker Who Looks Sad All The Time.

Watch him as he shuffles around the field. His shoulders rounded, his face hidden by his comfort beard. His eyes: deep, soft, shadowed. He looks a bit like an otter, albeit an otter that’s just received some terrible personal news. An otter watching Ring of Bright Water, perhaps. An otter that fell asleep holding hands, and woke up alone.

This ambient sadness endures even through the goals, of which there have been plenty. Sure, he smiles, and he pumps his fist, and he waves his arms around and all the rest of it. He knows what to do. But the eyes always betray him. This is temporary, they whisper. This joy will pass. Despair will return again.

It is a curse, of sorts. Elite strikers aren’t supposed to look sad. They are the apex predators, they get the glamour job. They should look fierce, or focused, or maybe smooth and suave. Most importantly, they should look in control. Theirs is the job of winning games, and they are here to work.

But sadness — or at least, the impression of sadness — sits uneasily with control. Sadness suggests that the universe is happening to a person, that person is not happening to the universe. And they know it. And they feel it.

Perhaps this is why Higuain’s misses endure more than his hits. His goal-scoring numbers have been consistently good, occasionally tipping over into great, yet words like choker and fraud have always followed him around. In part, this is because everybody is somebody’s fraud — that’s just the rules of the internet.

All strikers miss chances. But for the Striker Who Looks Sad All The Time, every miss seems somehow appropriate, even proper. The miasma of misery renders the failures definitive: of course he’s missed. He was always going to miss. Look at his eyes. He knows what’s going on.

Higuain is not alone. The man he’s replacing at Chelsea, Alvaro Morata, has been the picture of loneliness ever since he turned up in London, drifting around Stamford Bridge like a love-cursed adolescent, drafting another poem that he’ll never send. Presumably a couple of years with Diego Simeone will beat that out of him.

Going a little further back, Andy Cole was another player of sorrowful countenance, whose missed chances came to define him perhaps more than they should have. And the future is looking bright thanks to Gabriel Jesus, forever quivering on the edge of tears, forever looking as though Vincent Kompany has just run over his dog.

For the moment, however, Higuain stands as football’s finest Charlie Brown. And so it makes sense that he’s washed up at Chelsea, where Fernando Torres, Andrei Shevchenko, and plenty others have shrugged and moped their way around the penalty area. A heavy shirt, for the heaviest of football’s hearts.