You might have seen the video.
At the last count, 3.6 million people had clicked on YouTube to see the footage put out by the Football Association. It is an almost implausible piece of skill, from an England Under-21s training session, and to watch it back now is to be reminded what a majestic footballer we are talking about.
A corner has been taken from the right and Morrison, running in, clearly thinks that heading the ball, or going for the volley, is far too dreary for a player with his gifts.
Gianfranco Zola did something similar for Chelsea once, against Norwich City. Yet the cross for Morrison is higher and he is further out from goal. He is mid-air, twisting 90 degrees, when his back leg comes round to connect with the ball. And then there is the sweet sound of ball against net.
Morrison saunters away, as if it is the most normal thing in the world.
What has never been reported until now is that the success of that video prompted a rethink of the social media strategy at the FA, led by Southgate.
Behind the scenes, there was a feeling it was not necessarily a positive thing that the video went viral. Southgate and his coaches were mindful that the internet was full of footballers who can look like world-beaters in 15-second clips. They wanted, in short, for Morrison to show he could do it in proper games. The decision was taken that the FA’s social-media staff had to check with the coaches before putting out anything like that again.
Nobody, however, could have accused Morrison at that stage of being only a YouTube sensation.
Look at the movement and assurance that saw him glide through the Tottenham Hotspur defence to win West Ham’s goal of the season award in 2013.
https://twitter.com/WestHam/status/1180754564842020864Or the expertise of his two debut goals for England Under-21s against Lithuania (let’s not dwell on the fact he started fighting with his own team-mate Wilfried Zaha in the same match).
Nor does it feel too long ago since a group of us journalists had an audience with Roy Hodgson, reflecting on England’s qualification for the 2014 World Cup, and Morrison was mentioned among the players who could force their way into the squad.
Morrison was playing so beautifully for West Ham at the time that it did not feel incongruous to talk about him that way. But that ended badly, too. Morrison’s fall-out with Allardyce was severe (the player reputedly taped one of their conversations) and he moved on loan to QPR in the Championship.
“The problem, once he has a narrative around him, is that each manager is going to wait until the first mistake and then it’s a case of, ‘I knew he’d do that’,” Burchnall says.
“I tried to look in a deeper context about him as a person. I didn’t mind if he made a mistake, I didn’t mind if he had a training session when he wasn’t quite on it. We just accepted that was going to be part of his characteristics and, OK, we’ll work with that. People say he has a bad attitude… he had a brilliant attitude. He was competitive, he was a winner. He didn’t play a lot for us because, financially, it was always going to be a short-term thing. But I tell you one thing, we never lost a game he started.”
Unfortunately for Morrison, it has always been easier to get a bad name in football than it has been to lose one.
In his case, the reputation was forged at an early age and he has never been able to put that right because, first and foremost, that would have meant showing he was capable of maintaining a level of performance over a sustained period of time.
Don’t make the mistake, however, of thinking that his entire life is not shaped around football, or that he does not care about the sport.
One of the stories from his days at Birmingham is of the manager, Lee Clark, working late in his office at the training ground and hearing voices from the dressing room. It was Morrison and a group of mates who had sneaked in for a game on the top pitch. And this might not have been the first time. There are stories of the same happening at West Ham and other appearances at Manchester’s Powerleague Soccerdome.
The paradox is that he does not seem to have been seduced by Manchester United in the way that most boys would be. He was there from the age of nine and, over time, seems to have grown disillusioned being with the kids and the reserves, listening to the shouts from the first-team players on the next field.
Less-talented players had been moved across to the seniors before him, which he found hard to take. Ferguson told him he would be, too, on one condition: he had to go three months without missing a training session.
Morrison was not wired that way. On one occasion, he was left out of a reserve game. “Piss take” was his verdict on Twitter. The following day, Ferguson rolled his eyes at a press conference to mark his 25th anniversary as manager. “There is always something,” he said. “Every day brings something new.”
The people close to Morrison have always tried to make a case that some of his misdemeanours were to make other people happy and that his biggest fault was not knowing how to say no. The time, for example, he took an old pair of boots, belonging to a first-team player, from the dressing room and gave them to a friend. The boots, Morrison later explained, were no longer wanted by the first-team player. But the story somehow got out and, again, added to his reputation.
There was also the sideshow of Morrison tweeting Rio Ferdinand for support after rumours surfaced on Twitter about him stealing a watch from the dressing room. Ferdinand confirmed it was untrue.
But there have also been incidents when you can understand why Morrison’s team-mates, managers and coaches have grown tired of his behaviour. There was the time Morrison tweeted a message from United’s player of the year dinner that it was “shit”. Or the occasion Morrison got into an argument with one of his Twitter followers and called him “gay”, getting a disciplinary charge and a fine from the FA.
Chelsea toyed with the idea of signing him. Newcastle United offered £500,000. Arsenal were interested. Barcelona, Roma, Paris Saint-Germain: they all knew about him. Yet the big clubs decided he was too risky and, when Morrison moved to Lazio a few years later, one director, Igli Tare, talked about an enigma who “has undoubted quality and is world-class, as well as being a little mad”.
One story was of Morrison wanting to come back, after only one week in Rome, because Lazio did not have salad cream in the canteen. It sounds a bit far-fetched but Morrison has talked himself about foreign excursions where “I have this thing — I don’t know if it’s a mental thing — where I have difficulty eating… it was literally in my head that I couldn’t eat”.
On one trip to eastern Europe, he was “living off Rice Krispies bars and Jaffa Cakes”. He had “absolutely rotten teeth,” according to Allardyce, and it is true that Morrison’s diet, and dental problems, have been recurring issues.
“He had a fear of the dentist,” Slade says, more sympathetically. “He was complaining about toothache and we had to ensure someone was with him to make sure he went in. Otherwise it was never going to get fixed.”
Then consider the story that Colin Gordon tells about receiving an SOS from John Peacock, then-manager of England Under-17s, when the squad were preparing for a game in Azerbaijan in 2009.
Gordon, whose business partner John Colquhoun represented Morrison, was booked on a flight to Baku and went straight to the team hotel with a crate of Lucozade and a box of Mars bars. Morrison, he says, had “convinced himself that if he ate foreign food, he’d be poisoned”.
At Carrington, Manchester United’s training ground, there would be times when a battered old white van would turn up at the gates and Morrison would pile out of the back. On other occasions, he simply did not bother going in.
Again, it was difficult to find too much in the way of sympathy. What was the point, someone from Old Trafford once asked, of “having feet like Ravel Morrison if you are also going to have the mind of Ravel Morrison?”
Morrison didn’t go to nightclubs. He didn’t drink. He developed a penchant for fast cars but, back then, his evenings were often spent hanging around on street corners with lads on BMXs. He was streetwise.
An image formed of Morrison as a wannabe gangster and he has had to live with that, to some extent, ever since.
Just consider the autobiography of Terry McDermott, once assistant manager at Birmingham, who writes fondly of Morrison but also makes a flippant remark that there was “talk of him having a gun when he was in Manchester”. He didn’t have one and it was a silly thing to say but typical, perhaps, of the kind of thing people have said about Morrison. Nothing much seemed to change, however, on the various occasions Morrison has put on Twitter that people were judging him without knowing him.
It was McDermott and Clark, with their Newcastle backgrounds, who told Morrison that if he knuckled down, he could be as good as Paul Gascoigne.
The punchline to this story was that Morrison had no idea who Gascoigne was — but if this is another Gazza-like story of flawed genius, the younger man has shown that genius only fleetingly.
What a shame that, in Morrison’s entire career, there have been only 52 occasions when he has started and finished a senior match in the 10 years since signing his first professional contract.
You can listen to Rio Ferdinand, who says he “would pay to watch Ravel train” and was one of the senior pros who used to try to keep him out of trouble. “The first day I saw him, the boss (Ferguson) said to me, ‘Look at this kid, No 7 on the training pitch, come and watch; best kid I’ve ever seen’. He trained with the first-team at 16 and he was taking the mickey out of the other players.”
Or you can listen to Allardyce, who has a less complimentary view and will argue that the comparisons with Gascoigne are unfair. “Gazza wanted to play and train. Rav wasn’t bothered. I do feel sorry for him, because he had a tough upbringing and didn’t learn any life skills. I had endless conversations with him where he would nod, say, ‘Yes’ and ‘No problem. I’ll do it’, but the minute he was out of the door, he was back to his destructive ways. There were more important ways to spend my time than on someone who patently didn’t want to change.”
It is a sad story, ultimately, when you think where Morrison is now: looking for a new club, on the eve of a new season, with only a smallish number of people willing to speak up on his behalf. But don’t assume this is him on football’s scrapheap. He has had offers from Turkey, the Netherlands and England, and is keeping fit by working with a personal trainer and daily visits to the gym.
It has been a long time since he was last in trouble and the people who know him best say it is unfair that almost every headline about him appears to be a negative one. Why, they ask, is his reputation as a “bad boy” brought up more than various other players who have been in trouble with the law?
What he needs more than anything, perhaps, is a manager who believes in him and is willing to shape the entire team around him.
At Ostersund, Burchnall moved him from his usual role as an attacking player into a deeper position at the base of midfield. The Andrea Pirlo role, if you like.
“I was letting him get the ball off the goalkeeper and the centre-halves,” Burchnall says. “The whole game flowed around him. I just gave him the ball — ‘Go and have the ball. Make 100 to 120 passes per game. You control the game, Rav’. He was like a conductor.
“He almost talks on the pitch, you know what I mean? It was scary to see what he could do and what he saw on the pitch. It was scary to see his understanding of the game. I would see a pass from the side. He would already have seen two or three better options and he had the talent to execute them. We’d be like, ‘Wow, has he really just done that?’”
