WATCH: Chelsea striker Alvaro Morata takes on Twitter trolls

Social media, and Twitter in particular, are an inescapable part of modern life. But while giving every human being with access to the Internet a voice sounds like a decent idea in theory, in practice, it just leads to a lot of noise, most of it useless and crass and trollish or worse. Turns out, if there is one thing humans are good at is being nasty to each other — as if we didn’t know this already from history — and the Internet has just enabled all of us do that practically anonymously, on a much more personal level, and to a much wider audience.

As Morata points out, lobbing abuse from behind the computer screen is easy and safe and almost without any real world consequence. There’s no physical confrontation or threat of physical pain that would normally discourage people from behaving badly. Would any of these trolls ever say these things to someone’s face? Would ‘Sai Agarwal; walk up to Morata and tell him point blank “Your first touch is awful, and that may be an understatement”? I highly doubt it. There’s no accountability — the UK may have hate speech laws that may curb the most extreme instances (well outside the usual sports takes), but no such things exists in the USA, for example — you just sit down, thrown on a #NotMyCaptain hashtag, and watch the retweets roll in.

But this is the world that we’ve created, the world that we’ve made our own. Maybe it’ll be better in the future; maybe worse. For now, it’s filled insults and anger and hot takes. So here’s Alvaro Morata to “prove” some of these “people” wrong, as if their opinion was worth the time and effort of proving wrong. But I suppose it’s all in good fun — Morata’s part, not the Twitterati’s.

In everything he does and everything that’s said about him, Morata seems like a genuinely nice person and one who understands the pressures and travails (and abuse) that come with a job like his. His nonchalance about his FIFA card just raised him up a couple notches in my book, too.

This video shoot at Dulwich Hamlet with Copa 90 was done just ahead of the Arsenal match. Since then, Morata has picked up an unfortunate hamstring injury, which Chelsea are still hopeful won’t keep him out for over a month, as is currently expected.

For what it’s worth, he is doing some light training at Cobham, as he posted on his Instagram live. Get well soon, Alvaro!