“Teacher, don’t worry, I’m going to solve the game”: Pana Tejada’s first coach as a child reveals where his scoring instinct came from

As a boy, Luis Tejada, raised on the main street of San Joaquín in Panama, the most feared neighborhood in the city that resembles a favela, found in soccer the way to support his family, but now at the age of 41 he dies playing to football.

El Comercio contacted his first coach, Alfredo Poyatos, who did not know what had happened to Luis Tejada. “The sadness of this news has left me disoriented, I don’t know what to say, sorry,” he tells us at first, where we hear inconsolable crying.

And of course, Poyatos knew Luis Tejada from a very young age, when ‘Curvo’ was a ball boy and because of his biotype he invited him to train with Tauro FC, one of the biggest clubs in his country.

“The way to remember him is his way of offering good football, how he scored goals, which was what Luis Tejada liked, since he told me: “Professor, don’t worry, I’m going to solve the game. And he scored two goals, being a child“, he says, with tears, and Poyatos’ affection for Tejada has only one size: it is as if he were his son.

“Tejada was a player who greatly influenced his teammates, in the way he transmitted that confidence. Since I saw him play, I identified the confidence he had in himself. He always performed on the field, because he scored goals. “Tejada had that neighborhood boy courage that made him different,” he added.

But not everything was rosy for the life of the remembered Luis Tejada, the deficiencies in what he lived meant that he would not dedicate himself one hundred percent to football. “Sometimes he missed training, he didn’t go, because of problems at home and later I confirmed that, but he wanted to get ahead, he worked for that and he achieved it with positive attitude and goals. Tejada was a boy who achieved what he thought he wanted and gave confidence to his other teammates. The news that you have given me is devastating, God knows why he does things and you have to be strong to move forward,” he stated.

Tejada opened the doors to Panamanian soccer players, I’m not saying it, the facts say it, and in Panama everyone suffers from his departure, but he is surely satisfied from heaven because he was able to help his family through soccer.

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