Ruotsissa ja Borossa ei ollut ainakaan mitään treeneistä myöhästelyä jne.
Tuossa jutussa myös mainitaan myöhemmin, ettei Morrisonin annettu käyttää ADHD-lääkitystä, vaikka sellainen on todettu.
The first thing I said to him was that he should be proud of everything he has achieved. Every time he posts on Twitter, there are 20 people telling him, ‘You’re just a wasted talent, you’re just an idiot’. Nobody knows who he is. But there’s no way those people can continually say those things, digging away at him, without it having an impact and without him maybe believing it’s true. So I told him, a lot of times, that he should be proud, because very few people get to play for Manchester United or Lazio.”
There are not many people in this world willing to defend Ravel Morrison from the common allegation that he has sold himself short, that he has wasted all that rare talent and has only himself to blame.
But Ian Burchnall, formerly the manager of Ostersund, is one.
“I had a good experience with him,” he tells The Athletic. “I liked him. We’ve kept in contact and I have a lot of time for him. Ostersund are a small club in the north of Sweden, where he could have come in as a big-time Charlie, but that was never the case. He never missed a training session, never arrived late, never went AWOL. He was polite, he was grateful for everything, he was gracious. There was humbleness.
“I talked a lot to Ravel individually. We’d talk about life, his background, his brothers, his nan. He’s unbelievably misunderstood. It’s so flippant and easy to say he has thrown his talent away and wasted everything when, I tell you what, he hasn’t had it easy throughout his life.
“Human beings are complex and talent is only a small fraction of what makes a footballer, so, in my opinion, he should be proud. He has played for Manchester United and West Ham and QPR. He has gone to Lazio, one of the biggest clubs in Italy. He has played for Atlas in Mexico, where he was brilliant. It is lazy to say he’s wasted his career or been an idiot, or all those other things that get thrown at him. It goes deeper than that and there are complexities to his mindset that people need to understand. I try — but I don’t always understand them.”
Morrison spent four months on loan at Ostersund after managing only eight appearances for Lazio and quickly realising he was not suited to life in Italy.
I have many positive stories,” Burchnall says. “The kitman was a refugee from Darfur and Rav really took care of him. Rav would take him down to the hairdresser to get a cut with him. He bought him an iPad. He was always giving things away, buying things for people, being nice.
“I remember there was one supporter who hero-worshipped him, so Rav ran into the club shop and bought a shirt. He had ‘Ravel’ put on the back and gave it to this kid. He did a lot of things that were really kind, but people don’t hear so much about them.”
It is true. Chances are you have probably never heard anyone talk about Morrison this positively before. And that, perhaps, is the saddest thing when it comes to a player Sir Alex Ferguson once described as “the best kid you will ever see”.
Ferguson used to rate Morrison above Paul Pogba in the United side that won the 2011 FA Youth Cup. Morrison was extra special, according to Fergie. Better than the young Ryan Giggs. Better than Paul Scholes. Better than all of them. It was no wonder Ferguson described it as “very painful” when everything started to unravel and he decided United had no choice but to cut him free.
And who else is prepared to stand up for Morrison when the new Premier League season starts this weekend and he finds himself without a club?
One member of staff at Old Trafford became so exasperated with the various no-shows, his apparent lack of focus, the court appearances and repeated acts of indiscipline, that the player’s mother, Sharon, turned up to collect him one day and was told he was a “waste of space”.
His last club was Sheffield United, where the manager, Chris Wilder, said Morrison might be worth £60 million if he could get a run in their team.
Morrison played a total of 12 minutes in the Premier League and, midway through last season, was loaned to Middlesbrough in the Championship. That didn’t work out either and Middlesbrough sent him back early. Just like Cardiff City did when he was on loan from West Ham. And just like Birmingham City threatened to do after various misdemeanours, including a training-ground punch-up with one of team-mates, during another loan arrangement with the London club.
At West Ham, where Morrison had his best run of Premier League football, he played 24 times. For Birmingham, there were 30 appearances. For Queens Park Rangers, it was 13, Cardiff seven and there were four games each for Sheffield United and Middlesbrough. At Atlas, in Guadalajara, he played 25 times. For Ostersund, it was six. For Manchester United, there were three, all substitute appearances in the League Cup. And, tough as it is, Morrison might have to understand why so many people get angry, genuinely angry, about the popular narrative that has him as this supremely talented player, holding the keys to the football universe, but then letting it slip away.
These ought to be Morrison’s peak years and a time in his life where he should be playing at the point of maximum expression. Instead, at the age of 27, his career appears to have come to a temporary standstill and the difficult truth is that he has never made more than 30 appearances for any of his clubs.
Why is it that, when his name is mentioned now, and the fact he is out of work, one of his former colleagues announces (heavy in sarcasm), “Surprise!”
Who will speak up for Ravel Morrison?
When the Premier League season returns, who knows where he will be or what he will be doing.
Not everyone at Old Trafford has washed their hands of Morrison since Ferguson decided it was time to let him go.
Gary Neville, for one, has kept in touch with the player Ferguson wrote about in his 2015 book, Leading, in a passage referring to players who “despite enormous natural talent, just aren’t emotionally or mentally strong enough to overcome the hurts of their childhood and their inner demons”.
Morrison, Ferguson wrote, was “perhaps the saddest case”. He had “as much natural talent as any youngster we ever signed but kept getting into trouble”.
What has never been reported until now is that Morrison had also been diagnosed with ADHD, a mental health disorder, and there were perhaps complex reasons, therefore, why the player may have acted the way he did sometimes. But then again, Morrison has gone through almost all of his professional life without people knowing the facts and judging him on reputation alone. People know what he has done — just not necessarily why.
He and his close circle will never be persuaded that Manchester United looked after him appropriately and one vital detail came out in one of his court appearances: Morrison’s football career meant he wasn’t taking the medication he had been prescribed to help him cope with his disorder.
Neville, like Burchnall, takes the view that it is too complex to write off Morrison as a waster or a troublemaker, or all the other labels that have been attached to him over the years. Neville has taken the time to find out about the player’s family, his background and the difficulties he endured in his younger years, growing up for a long time with his grandparents. Morrison, he says, has encountered “significant complexities and challenges in his life”.
There is also a degree of mitigation when it comes to Morrison’s inability to make a favourable impression at Sheffield United last season. This time, there were no disciplinary problems and, if anything, a fair amount of evidence that he is a more rounded and mature individual, whose behaviour has dramatically improved in the last few years. The problem was straightforward: Wilder had a settled side and a preferred formation that did not require a No 10, Morrison’s usual position.
Morrison was not match-fit when he arrived at Middlesbrough and, by the time he got himself in better shape, the season was interrupted by the COVID-19 shutdown. Jonathan Woodgate was sacked a week after the restart. The team were in the relegation zone and the new manager, Neil Warnock, could probably be forgiven for thinking it was not a time to experiment with such a mercurial player.
The Athletic has spoken to people at Middlesbrough who talk about Morrison being unfailingly polite and, overall, a pleasant surprise given his reputation. It is the same at Bramall Lane, where Wilder asked some of the more established pros to make sure Morrison knew the correct times for training, team meetings and so on. All the relevant people say he left both clubs on good terms.
Gareth Southgate is an admirer of Morrison, going back to his days in charge of England Under-21s. Harry Redknapp managed Morrison at QPR and tried to sign him on three other occasions. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer will eulogise about Morrison’s ability from his days as Manchester United reserves manager and the Jamaican football authorities still want the player to switch his allegiances to the Reggae Boyz.
At the same time, how many clubs have looked at Morrison’s career trajectory and leapt to the conclusion, to borrow a word that Jose Mourinho once applied to Mario Balotelli, that he is “unmanageable”?
How many managers have taken the view that, if Ferguson was unable to handle him, was it really worth the hassle?
Russell Slade tried at Cardiff but realised, in the end, that it was beyond him. “The one thing everybody will tell you is he has ability in abundance,” Slade says. “Some of the things he did in training, sitting players on the floor, dragging the ball round them… they were ridiculous. He had so much ability. But the mentality side of it — mental strength — is so important as well in football.”
Morrison had joined Cardiff when his time at West Ham, in particular his relationship with the then-manager Sam Allardyce, went so sour it ended with the player signing a confidentiality agreement not to talk about it.
Slade takes a sympathetic view but also knows enough about his own business to understand why various colleagues, under intense pressure to get results, might have doubts about taking on Morrison.”If you look at the managers who have had him, having already been at X, Y and Z, don’t go thinking if you’re somebody down the road that you’re the one who can do something about it,” is his verdict. “I put these players in a unique bracket. There is only so much you can do. They have to help themselves. It’s about having a focus, day in and day out. It can be very frustrating.”
Wayne Rooney also sounded frustrated when he mentioned Morrison in a recent Sunday Times column, saying he “had everything required for a player in his position” and adding: “But he struggled with lifestyle and his environment, which was sad for him because I saw Paul Pogba come through, Jesse Lingard, all these players, and Ravel was better than any of them by a country mile.”
Rooney’s conclusion was that it came down to the player’s work ethic. Others, Gary Neville included, will appreciate there is more to it. Morrison’s childhood was difficult, to say the least, with no apparent father figure. Colin Gordon, one of the agents who used to help look after him, has described his difficulties in absorbing instructions, adding, “at times, he was such a lovely kid. He’s not got a bad bone in his body but he never really understood what he needed to do to be a footballer”.
But one of the other things you learn about Morrison is that, in most cases, the people who have encountered him in football will talk with regret, and sometimes even affection, rather than anger or malice.
“Don’t go knocking him,” Slade says. “He’s a likeable lad. He’s not a nasty kid. If people think he is a wrong ‘un, he’s not. I’d defend him. He’s a good guy. You can have a chat with him. He’s got a sense of humour. There’s just something missing.”
https://theathletic.com/2046045/2020/09/09/ravel-morrison-manchester-united-west-ham-lazio/
