Mozza
- Thread Starter Steve R
- Start date
Cheers Steve I'll listen to this on my way up to London now
Did he mention his best moment of being at the club.. Meeting Mrs R at the Christmas party?
Shrurrup Noris
Will watch this later but just adding the WoL version for getting a quickish fix
WARNING:- Contains spoilers
Former Cardiff City captain Sean Morrison has bared all in a candid and wide-ranging interview about his old club.
Morrison is a Bluebirds legend, having amassed 295 appearances over eight years with the club and captaining City in the Premier League.
The centre-back, 33, officially left Cardiff in January 2023 almost a year after suffering a horrendous ACL injury away to Barnsley during Steve Morison's reign as manager
But the intervening period after sustaining that injury in that freezing cold clash at Barnsley, Morrison admits that times were tough. The operation and subsequent rehabilitation was gruelling, while Morrison's contract was set to run out at the end of July.
Any footballer will tell you that is a precarious position to find yourself in, but in a video which has gone viral since the interview went live late on Sunday night, Morrison revealed one situation which left himself feeling extremely disappointed.
"Matty May, the physio, rang me and said 'You need to speak to Steve [Morison], Steve just rang me, he doesn't want you to come in and do your rehab in the morning, he wants you in at two o'clock every day'," he told The Central Club podcast
"I said, 'What do you mean, two o'clock every day?' and he said, '"I don't know mate, he doesn't want you in the building in the morning when all the players are in. So you need to come in when everyone's gone.'
"So I was thinking, 'f*****g hell, my head's gone. I'm raging. I rang the missus and explained the situation to her and she said, 'Don't ring him now, ring him later. Cool down. Think about what you've got to say.'
"Pre-season starts in like two days and he's telling me I've got to be in at two o'clock. So I'm thinking, what have I done to this f*****g guy? We didn't get on, but we never argued or anything.
"He's a weak man. A weak man. If you don't want me, at least ring me.
"So I thought, I'm ringing him. So I rang him that evening. I've gone upstairs and said, 'Steve, what's the craic with you wanting me in at two o'clock? What's the reason?'
"Then it was like, 'Oh it's not because I want you in at two o'clock. We've got a load of new players signing, there's probably going to be 14 or 15 new lads, I don't want anyone from last year's regime to maybe be in their ears...'
"I said, 'What are you talking about? I've got probably the worst injury an athlete can get, I'm rehabbing. I'm working by b******* off to try and get back fit and you're telling me that I'm going to be poisonous and a bad egg in the changing room? I'm not being funny, mate, I've been here eight years, I care about this club more than you do. I want to see this club succeed more than you do. So how are you telling me that I'm going to be a bad egg?'
"Lo and behold, he s*** his little pants and said I could come in at nine o'clock. I said, 'I'll come in when the physios tell me to come in, I'll stay out of your hair and I won't get in the way.'
"Then I come in the next day, the day before all the boys come in and he's acting like he's my best mate and he ended up getting this injury contract for me so I could get insured once I started training again. But it's f****** bonkers. It's like the biggest U-turn ever. It was mad."
Looking back over his time at the club, Morrison opened up on his introduction to Cardiff, with 45 first-team players and cliques between the foreign players and British players, describing the dressing room as a "mess" and a "shambles" until Russell Slade took over from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. In fact, after his first week, he admitted phoning his agent and telling him he'd made a mistake by leaving Reading. Sign up to our daily Cardiff City newsletter here.
"Whenever I speak about Russell Slade, I speak about him in the highest regard. He helped the club move forward," he added. "Without him, there's no [Neil] Warnock being able to galvanise the squad Sladey had built to win promotion. Sladey deserves massive credit and he is a great guy, man, one of the best."
Morrison said he didn't realise the magnitude of Vincent Tan's decision to turn the kit from blue to red until he got to the club. He revealed that the owner held regular meetings with the squad throughout his time at the club, largely centred around players taking as many shots as they can from anywhere on the pitch, citing a "law of averages" that will mean that goalkeepers' "hands will get tired". Clearly, shots on goal are still at the forefront of the owner's mind, with interim boss Omer Riza last weekend revealing that formed a sizeable part of their pre-match conversation before the 5-0 win over Plymouth Argyle.
But Morrison knows now more than ever how much damage turning the club to red had done, adding: “You’ve got the red seats up on the top which still bugs me to this day. I went to the Leeds game a couple of weeks ago, and when I look up at those red seats it f****** bothers me. It bothers me so much.”
Crucially, though, Morrison enjoyed so many good times with the Bluebirds. He remembers being nervous about Neil Warnock coming in, thinking some sort of "dictator" was going to come in after seeing videos of him berating Sheffield United players on YouTube, but said he was "the complete opposite" of what he thought.
Morrison said that promotion season under Warnock was the best of his career to date. Although it didn't come without some off-field controversy for the ex-Bluebirds skipper, including a video of him digging out some Derby County players, chiefly Richard Keogh, going viral. But Morrison wanted to set the record straight on that incident which occurred after the famous 'Snowgate' incident.
"This video has got leaked and it looks terrible, but the actual story behind that was the game got called off, we are all in the hotel waiting for the taxi to take us and we're having a few beers," he recalls.
"We we messaging the Derby boys back and forth, because they were in the boozer as well, because the game had been called off. We were in the hotel, they were in a bar in Derby going out on the p***. We are going away on international break, just firing off videos between us all - the Derby boys were fully involved in it. They were firing videos across, messages.
"We start sending videos and they were loving it - like 'more, more, more, hammer this person, hammer this person' - we were all sending videos through just hammering different people and having a bit of banter. Each time it just escalated further, further, further, you're just saying stuff to get a laugh out of each other.
"But one of the videos that got sent through to Bradley Johnson, he put it in the group chat at Derby and someone has taken it out of there and sold it to a journalist. It was sent to Richard Keogh, Alex Pearce, they are the boys I'm hammering. It looks terrible but it's all banter."
Warnock called a meeting with Morrison, Lee Peltier and Anthony Pilkington, all of whom were involved, and his skipper recanted the full story. The manager was satisfied with Morrison's explanation and was happy to sweep it under the rug, with just a couple of months left in the season and promotion very much on the line.
Of course, Cardiff did win promotion that season and made a valiant attempt to stay up the following year. It irks Morrison that Cardiff kept 10 clean sheets, won 10 games and still got relegated. That controversial Chelsea game, and the infamous offside goal by Cesar Azpilicueta, looms large in Morrison's memory.
“I’ve got a Premier League Man of the Match trophy at home, it’s f****** lovely, but it says Cardiff-Chelsea," he said of that game. "It f****** grinds me, I keep it in a cupboard, I can’t look at it because it p***** me off because I think about that goal.”
Those years after were difficult. After a play-off season under Neil Harris, periods under Mick McCarthy and Morison were increasingly tough either side of Covid.
Continuing about his exit, he said: "I was angry, disappointed, upset, because I'd given everything to the club for eight seasons. I bled Cardiff, I was all in, everything.
"So to have got the worst injury I've ever got, be told I was not going to play football for a year and best-case I'd be at 90 percent when I came back.... everyone's time comes to an end. I'm not an idiot. At some point that that Cardiff journey would come to an end.
"If I didn't do my ACL I believe I would have stayed for another season or two. I believe I would have made it to 10 seasons and that would have been phenomenal.
"But when I was told in the December that my contract wasn't going to get renewed and that I would be released, it was a shower of s*** again. Huds (Mark Hudson) had to tell me. Huds had just taken over as caretaker and it was one of his first jobs. I played with Huds and I know him well, he's got to sit in an office and tell me, 'By the way, Sean, we're not going to keep you on.'
"So it's s*** for him. He shouldn't have had to do that. It should have been the CEO or the chairman. Just tell me like a man, I'm not an idiot. By the time I'd got released, the writing had been on the wall for months, I'd got over it."
He added: "If I had got to the end of the season and they wanted to release me then, I would have been able to have actually played my last game. My last game was Barnsley away, where I did my ACL, that's probably the one thing that bugs me. I never got a last time to walk out at Cardiff City Stadium as a player. I loved playing in that stadium."
Despite Cardiff's current plight — they moved off the bottom of the table at the weekend after earning their second win of the campaign — the ex-Bluebirds skipper foresees sunnier skies ahead.
"Speaking to Rallsy (Joe Ralls) last week, I met him for dinner, it's a hard place to be at Cardiff when things aren't going well, because the expectation is so big, because it is a f****** big club. In my opinion, a sleeping giant.
"I have all faith (they will be back in the Premier League), at some point they will be a mainstay in the Premier League and be a massive club, it's got the potential to be huge.
"I was speaking to Rallsy the other night, him telling me how good the changing room is, despite the results, they are still together. Fans want to see that fight, grit and togetherness."
Russell Slade gets loads of flak but I don't think people realise how good a job he actually did and he clearly gets a lot respect from the players, Morrison would know better than anyone.
That's the part that stuck out to me as well. Probably one of the most thankless tasks a manager has had to perform, yet he did it well and professionally.
The other part that stuck out is that Steve Morison is a gutless turd.
Remember when he used to dig out the youngsters? Now we know why.
WEED CLUB He comes out really poorly from Mozza's account of it
Also Tan’s a fucking imbecile.
Yeah but to fair to Steve Morison, the only story Sean Morrison can cite is the time he asked him to come in at 2pm instead of 9am, Sean M calling to complain about it and Steve M agreeing to 9am after all.
In fairness although the quality of the football under Slade was terrible, I think it’s widely accepted that he did a really good job under the circumstances he found himself in.
Just finished listening and that was one of the most honest and insightful interviews from a former city player that I’ve ever heard.
I don’t know what it is but, despite all his experience, I just don’t see him as a coach or a manager, but it’s good to see he’s going to be involved with the academy.
I don’t know what it is but, despite all his experience, I just don’t see him as a coach or a manager, but it’s good to see he’s going to be involved with the academy.
Amongst long term sensible City fans I'd agree but plenty blamed him for the mess he inherited and the crap transition he had to handle. Fair play to Morrison - it's good to hear him praise Slade so much as usually all he gets is a grudging respect
