Musa Barrow is very shy and that is how he defines himself. He affirms that football has changed his way of being, but not enough. “In video calls with my mother I look here and there, almost never at the screen. To be honest, it’s not easy for me to look anyone in the eye,” explains in Gazette. Perhaps that is why when he faces a goalkeeper he does not look at him but at the holes he leaves in his goal. Gambia, who face hosts Cameroon in the quarter-finals today, have scored four goals in this edition of the Africa Cup of Nations and he has participated in all of them with two goals and two assists to his battle partner Ablie Jallow.
Although he is still shy with his mother, the one who calls him after every game to play the mother. “‘I saw you fall, how are you?’ And I, even though it hurts, tell him I’m fine because if he doesn’t keep calling”. She was key in his development as a person after the death of his father, whom he did not get to know after he died when Musa was only two months old. “I only know that I resemble him in attitudes”. He says that from seven in the morning he would go out to play soccer and people would come out of their houses to insult them. His mother, how could it be otherwise being a teacher, wanted him to study like his other siblings (one is an architect and the other a doctor) but he is the only one who has no studies.
Thanks to street football it came to Europe. “My life will really begin there”, he said during the months in which he was waiting for a visa to travel after his first trial with Atalanta. With Gasperini he did not find his place but with Mihajlovic in Bologna. The coach has helped him overcome his shyness problems to be more decisive in the final meters. “When I arrived, he took me aside and told me: ‘I know what your character is, I know you are better than bread, but when you shoot on goal you have to be bad'”.