MAGIC MATHEUS
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STEVE Morison stepped onto the Shrewsbury team bus after a 1-1 draw at AFC Wimbledon in September as a professional footballer.
It was a status earned the hard way. Released by Northampton at 20, the striker worked the early shift in a paper mill whilst playing parttime for Bishop’s Stortford, and didn’t return to the EFL with Millwall until he was pushing 26.
What followed was the stuff of fairytales. Play-off glory at Wembley. Twenty caps for Wales. A move to the Premier League with Norwich, where he scored ten times in his first season.
Yet by the time Morison stepped off that Shrewbury coach three-and-a-half hours later, it was all over.
“I came on as a sub late on that day,” explains the 36-yearold, who started just a handful of matches after joining the Shrews from Millwall in July.
“I was thinking ‘Do I really want to keep going up and down the country and not play the game I love?’
Journey
“Coming on and being a bitpart – that’s not what football is to me. It’s about being a focal point of the team, a mainstay in the manager’s plans. Once that changed, I didn’t enjoy playing anymore.
“I wasn’t prepared to travel around the country for no reason like I did at 20-21. I didn’t want to be a spectator. I didn’t feel like I was adding anything to the group, other than being a kind of mentor. And if that’s all I’m doing, I should be a coach. I pretty much made the decision to retire there and then.”
Asked to assess his rise from paper shredder to Premier League player, Morison channels the spirit of Robbie Williams, the former Take That star who once quipped that his successful pop career was the equivalent of stretching an elastic band to the moon and back.
“I wasn’t the quickest, the strongest, or the best,” says Morison, whose move to Millwall in 2009 was won on the back of three prolific seasons at Stevenage Borough, where he hired a personal sprint coach to improve his pace.
“But I squeezed every last drop out of my ability, and I created the best version of myself that I could.
“There’s always tiny things that you think ‘Maybe if I’d done this or that’, but my only real regret is that it didn’t click into place until I was 2526. That cost me five years.
“But I was working 4am shifts and playing football at the same time. Six years later, I was playing in the Premier League. I’ve played for Wales. My little lad has watched his dad score the winner at Wembley. I can’t complain.
“I’ve retired on my terms. Nothing is stopping me playing football. My body is intact. I could whack a pair of boots on tomorrow and do a job. I just didn’t want to be one of those people that moves around trying to get a game.”
Morison scored 89 goals in 152 games for Stevenage, plus a further 91 in 301 appearances over two spells at Millwall that included two League One play-off victories.
Nothing, though, can top the nine Premier League goals he scored for Norwich following a £3m switch to Carrow Road in 2011.
“From an emotional point of view, my time at Millwall was unbelievable,” he says. “Three Wembley finals, two wins, a great relationship with the supporters. I loved it.
“But to have Premier League goalscorer next to your name – that’s the pinnacle. That’s where we all want to be when we become professional players. I did that.
“When you’re on that train and you’re just going league to league to league, you don’t really think about it.
“But it is a different world up there. All of a sudden, everyone is as quick and as strong as you, if not more so.
“You have to adapt. You have to become a Premier League player. You have to be quicker on the ball, sharper in your movement. You have to concentrate harder and be more tactically aware.
“You have to be as fit as possible because you’re not going to see many players now in the Premier League who aren’t ridiculously athletic. I managed all of that, and to succeed for that season is probably my best achievement.”
Morison has made plenty of friends along the way, not least Grant Holt, the former Norwich skipper with whom he owns several greyhounds.
Yet his straight-talking, pull-no-punches interview
style – often criticising fan behaviour – has rubbed plenty of people up the wrong way.
In 2017, he publicly complained that Millwall fans had “ruined” their play-off victory by invading the Wembley pitch, and last year weighed in on the Spygate saga at former club Leeds, dismissing the infamous powerpoint presentation by Whites boss Marcelo Bielsa as a ‘smokescreen’.
“I always try to be honest when I talk about football,” he explains. “If someone asks you a question and you’ve got an opinion, air your views. What’s the worst that can happen? People don’t like hearing the truth sometimes. Yeah, there are certain issues you need to be PC about. But when it comes to what happens on the pitch or your feelings and emotions, why not be straight?
Appreciation
“The majority of people will appreciate it, even if some don’t. It’s too easy to hide behind lies and spin, isn’t it?
“At Millwall, my actions on the pitch were more important than anything I said. They saw that I gave everything I could and that I was a decent player. Throw in goals and wins, and that’s all they care about at the end of the day.
“Most Millwall fans appreciate me. It’s only the ones who look for problems and are deliberately negative who don’t. And nobody should let those people worry them.”
Northampton sure didn’t. The Cobblers wasted no time in offering Morison a coaching position at Sixfields, and the now ex-striker is hoping his varied experience can aid Jon Brady’s Under-18 squad.
“I’ve done all my work off the pitch,” says Morison, who has just completed his UEFA Pro Licence. “And I think I’m in a good place to give advice. Any player who asks a question, I’d like to think I have an answer for. Because I’ve either been there, done it or experienced it. There’s not much in football I haven’t seen.”
No-one can argue about that.