Two years without a goal, therapy sparks top scorer rise | OneFootball

Before becoming the top scorer of the Primera Nacional - with 16 goals in 26 matches this season -, Alejandro Gagliardi spent two years without scoring a goal. If the number 9 lives off goals, the Tano, a 36-year-old from Cordoba, spent two long years surviving. "It was tough. I worked with a psychologist because I was scoring goals in training but not in matches," he recalls in a chat with tycsports.com. He went through this crisis between 2019 and 2021, amidst the pandemic, during his first stint at Agropecuario de Carlos Casares. Today, five seasons later and with four more clubs under his belt, Gagliardi is enjoying his best footballing moment, once again friends with the net and in the best place it could happen: at Agropecuario. Full circle. Perfect revenge.

There were 27 matches in his first stint at Sojero, which he had joined at the request of Felipe de la Riva, in which he was choked with shouts and the goal blocked. He broke free on September 4, 2021, when he scored a double against San Telmo in the same division, but with another shirt: that of Villa Dálmine. "I couldn't, I was under the goal and the ball didn't want to go in. I was very closed, but there was a psychologist at the club, I talked to my partner and I went. Luckily many paths opened up for me and things improved," he says with the clarity of distance, and also thanks: "I thought it was going to be very difficult to get a club, especially playing as a 9, but I have to highlight De la Riva, who brought me here, took me to Dálmine and thus gave me a great hand".

Gimnasia de Jujuy, Santamarina de Tandil and Flandria were the shirts he wore, in addition to the Violeta, in that period that went from drought to resurgence. He scored goals at all of them. Until in January 2024, the president of Agropecuario, Bernardo Grobocopatel, called him to offer to resume the truncated story that had been left in Casares, where the number 9, who like all 9s lives off goals, was reunited with the goals. In other words, he came back to life. "I've been in many places, but this one is very similar to my hometown, although with much fewer people. But outside of football I have several acquaintances, friends and my partner's family, who are from here. That helps to make it much easier. Despite being a city, it feels like living in a village," he describes the town of less than 20,000 inhabitants, located northwest of the province of Buenos Aires, where he enjoys playing bocce, fishing and hunting.

But before this goal-scoring Gagliardi, there was a Gagliardi who debuted as a right midfielder, who was a full-back or wing-back, who shared trips and squad with a young Paulo Dybala and a Gagliardi who suffered for a whole year the 300 kilometers that separate Los Surgentes, his small hometown from the match of Marcos Juárez, from the Institute's boarding house, which he had joined at 16. Because although today he is a 9 who lives off goals, originally the Tano was a hard-working right midfielder, who stepped into the box and had a nose for goal. He made his debut in that position in 2007 when Jorge Ghiso gave him the chance.

His canonical event, the one that gave life to the Gagliardi who today has the goal between his eyebrows, happened in 2015, at his 26 years, when he defended the shirt of Nueva Chicago in the First Division. He had arrived at Torito in 2014 and managed to move up a category when the AFA decided to promote ten teams at once to form the now extinct long tournaments of 30. After using him as a midfielder throughout the year, at the end of the tournament Rubén Forestello decided to put him as a forward and Gagliardi scored ten goals in the last ten matches, which would not serve to keep Mataderos in the First, but to say goodbye to the division with five victories in a row. In that streak are the four goals he scored against Newell's on October 17, 2015 in a 5-0 victory. The Cordovan, who would emigrate to Monarcas Morelia of Mexico the following year, closed his stage at the club with 13 shouts in 30 encounters.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.