‘We want to see how far we go on this roller coaster’
Millwall revival may turn a few Premier League heads, Steve Morison tells Julian Bennetts
In the summer of 2015, two former Millwall team-mates met up at the Aquashow Water Park in the Algarve. As their families played in the sunshine, Steve Morison and Neil Harris slipped away for a quiet beer and a chat about what had happened to their beloved club.
Millwall had just been relegated to League One and the place was, according to Morison, “a shambles”. If there was hope it existed solely in Harris, Millwall’s record scorer and a true club legend, having just accepted the daunting post of manager.
Harris had a plan, and central to it was a new centre-forward and dressing-room leader: and he wanted Morison to fill both those roles. “I remember rejoining Millwall that summer, walking through the door and the club was just back,” recalls Morison. “It was different suddenly. We were back to where we needed to be. Now we are reaping our rewards.”
And those rewards could, to widespread astonishment, include promotion to the Premier League. Millwall go into tonight’s game with Fulham on the back of a 17-game unbeaten run that has taken them from 19th to sixth in the Championship, with the final play-off spot in their hands.
Despite having one of the smallest budgets and lowest average gates in the division, no star players and the lingering threat of losing their stadium, Millwall are in with a shot at the big time. “This is a free shot at promotion for us,” says Morison. “If other teams don’t make it, their manager will lose his job. They’ll release their players or sell them because they’re not good enough, and spend £20million to £30million to try and do it next year. That’s where the pressure is – it ain’t on us.
“If we make the play-offs we’d think, ‘We might as well go to Wembley now.’ And if we do that we’d be in the huddle before the game and I’ll say, ‘Shall we go Prem?’ We just want to see how far we can take this rollercoaster.”
But the question everyone is asking is how Millwall got here in the first place, having been promoted after sneaking into the League One play-offs on the final day of last season. “How has this happened? Hard work,” Morison says. “We run further than the other teams. We want it more.
“We’ve found our way of playing and I think lots of teams look at it and go, ‘We’re playing Millwall today, we’ll beat them as we’re better than them and get paid more than them.’ They turn up, we give them a whack after 10 minutes and they’re moaning because you shouldn’t be able to do that to them, it’s not in the script.
“Then we’ve added a bit of quality and as a team we defend manfully all over the pitch. There’s a real sense that if we play to our potential, nobody can beat us. In the dressing room the other day, someone said, ‘Fulham will be a tough game on Friday,’ and someone else came out with, ‘Nah, they can’t beat us.’
“We are an underdog team that work incredibly hard. Apart from Tim Cahill, every player in that dressing room, me included, if we stopped tomorrow we would have to work. This is our work now so we come in, work hard and enjoy being here.
“We play the same team every game and the same way every game, and we just keep having moments. We aren’t searching for an ingredient – we keep making the same cake.”
That means direct football, utter commitment and a rock-solid team spirit, with Harris’s background checks on every potential signing paying dividends. No one player is paid significantly more than any other, with Morison’s weekly “Thursday Club” nights out keeping the squad tight-knit.
Off the field the club has also won a battle with Lewisham Council over the compulsory purchase of land around the New Den, which could have left them homeless.
That galvanised the fanbase, while Harris worked wonders with the team.
Key to that was finding a settled side – he has made just three changes to his starting XI in as many games – as they became the form team in the division with the exception of tonight’s opponents, who are on a 21-game unbeaten run of their own. But, as expectations start to alter, those central to Millwall’s success are adamant that promotion would not change them.
“If we get there we’ll live the dream, but this club won’t start paying stupid money,” says Morison. “I look at teams that go up to the Premier League, pay players a fortune, come down and are still paying a fortune.
“I look at the geezer [Jack] Rodwell up at Sunderland, he gets paid £70,000 a week not to play. Where’s their drive? Where’s their ambition to get to the next level?
“This club won’t lose its values or workmanlike class. And it’s a nice club. People think it’s a horrible place to come and play but it’s actually a nice place – as long as you’re willing to work hard.”
Nice is not often a word associated with Millwall and their supporters, though. “I think it speaks volumes that no one wants us to get there, apart from people within the football club and our immediate supporters,” says Morison. “But as the motto says, we’re Millwall and we don’t care.”
They may not, but soon the Premier League might.