It may be a truism to say that we are where we are thanks to our mothers. At the very least, they were the ones who gave us life in the first place. But in the case of Samu (previously Omorodion because he does not want to be remembered by his father’s name; now Aghehowa because of the love he professes for his mother), the preponderance of his mother in getting him to where he is today is enormous.
Edith Aghehowa She had the courage to undertake a trip from Nigeria to Melilla, eight months pregnant, so that her son would be born in Spain and have a better future. I didn’t even suspect it yet, but I thus fulfilled the first requirement to be eligible for this country.
Mrs. Aghehowa lived years of sacrifice as a single mother to raise Samu and to his younger sisterenduring many economic hardships. This circumstance meant that Samu always had it sculpted in his head that he had to earn a living in football to be able to free his mother from so many precariousness and repay her for the efforts she had made for him.
This is attested to ABC by his coach for two years in the youth A team and in the Granada subsidiary, Juan Antonio Milla: «He always had his mother present. We lived it day to day. When he was in the youth team, he said that he wanted to reach the reserve team to have a better salary and be able to help his mother. And when he arrived at the reserve team, he wanted to see if he could have a chance in the first team, earn more, and thus help his mother.
Samu signs for Granada in 2021, at the age of 17, and his financial position was still complicated: «We knew about his situation, that they were having a bad time, with financial shortcomings, that’s why we tried to be on top of him, attentive. But being able to provide a better future for his mother has been Samu’s main motivation to continue improving.”
These pressures were known much more closely by Jesús Salmero, who trained Samu in the Nervión Sports Group during his cadet stage and in his first year of youth: «The boy always told us that his mother spent many hours sewing so that he could I could play soccer. The president on some occasions did not charge him the club fee, she gave him bonuses of five euros for each goal he scored… One day I wanted to leave him some boots, because his were broken and he did not have the money to buy others. But he was already wearing a size 47 and they weren’t worth it… Samu lived in Macarena, on the other side of Nervión, and he often came to training on foot or on a scooter because I didn’t have enough for the bus pass».
His mother was not going to see him
And Salmero defines the extent to which his family’s restrictions reached with this detail: “His mother very rarely came to see him play, because it was not the same.” pay a bus ticket that two».
Despite the difficulties, Samu did not miss a game and stood out above the rest: «Goals were falling from the youth team. He was a much bigger boy than the others and seemed uncoordinated and clumsy. But then he scored a goal. “He always played with children above his age, a higher category, and he stood out.”
AD Nervión has an agreement with Seville and BetisHowever, they never wanted to take the step of taking the Melilla native. «They always said that since they were so superior in Andalusia and all the teams were closed to them, Samu did not have enough resources to open defenses. That was always his excuse,” recalls Salmero.
They blamed the still beardless Samu for having difficulty defining himself. And that was what they worked on the most upon arriving at the Granada youth team, where they managed to score nearly 30 goals. This is how Milla explains it: «On a technical level he had a lot of room for improvement, but we made him aware of his strengths. He made many unchecks to come in support, but we made him see that his strength was to go to space. We practiced a lot of hand-to-hand skills, finishing with the first touch. And he himself demanded it and did a lot of his part to improve.
Along these lines, already in Nervión they were trying to polish his virtues: “We always looked for him to attack the first post, because he had such a stride that he always anticipated it.” And with that bill came his first goal in the First Division, precisely against the Atlético de Madrid. “I have seen him do the same thing in First Division that he did with us when he was a child,” says the coach from Seville.
His coach at Recreativo Granada, with whom he was promoted to Primera RFEF scoring 18 goals, talks about the player’s ambition: «When I bring him up to the reserve team at only 18 years old, you can see that his shirt is not too big for him. He left and they called him up for the U19 European Championship and we were already clear that we were going to see little of him in the reserve team…
And Salmero is convinced of what his ceiling will be: «He can be the ‘9’ of the national team for many years and will end up in the Premier with a very big transfer. “He is not the typical footballer who is obsessed with wanting more money or the most expensive car.” Samu only had one obsession: «Take his mother out of work. And he has already achieved it. But it’s not going to stop here.”
#glory #mother #Samus #life #Spanish #football
