The 'where are they now?' files

[baitman]

ripe for parody...

Yeh, but who could do such a thing

[Buzzo]

I admire certain aspects of what they're trying to do, but it really is ripe for parody. See that article when a Spurs writer got Clive Allen in his car and they drove to every London club Allen played for in one day and then he wrote a biblical article about it.

I mean, why?

"For my latest 10,000 word piece in The Athletic, I sat down with Rory Delap and we took our NVQ level 3 in Plumbing and Domestic Heating - read more on www.theathletic.com"

They’ve got a problem in justifying the subscription and their way round that appears to be overwriting every article and subject.

I’ve really enjoyed a lot of thee articles on Klopp over the last 2 years particularly the Melissa Reddy Joe ones, but you can’t sustain that sort of quality every day.

I struggled with the Adam Morgan article also, skim read the last 50,000 words.

[Chris]

Godrrard is doing some job!

[Fivex]

Wowsers

Celtic too

[Norbs]

Godrrard is doing some job!

That group wouldnt've looked out of place in the CL in recent history

[Harv]

Shaun Morgan’s minicab company is called Wiggy’s Wheels. Not so long ago, he was asked by a client to drive to Cheshire. The houses became bigger, the gates more formidable looking and beyond one of those gates was the crunch of stones and pebbles and a driveway that lasted a fair distance.

When a man emerged from the light of the front door and came to his window to pay, he arrived with a question. “Shaun. How’s Adam?” the man asked with an easy familiarity. He had played together with Shaun’s son in Liverpool’s youth teams. Raheem Sterling had set the chances up. Adam Morgan had scored the goals.

Memories came flooding back in the 20 or so minute conversation that followed. Sterling had arrived at Liverpool’s academy from Queens Park Rangers for £500,000. Morgan arrived most mornings from Halewood in Liverpool’s deep south, having been driven up the M57 by either his mum or dad while listening to Elvis Presley in the car.

They would make their Liverpool debuts in the same year, within five months of one another. There had been hundreds of games together at youth level but in the first team their shared story would amount to just three minutes of added time on a pitch in Edinburgh. That was during Liverpool’s narrow victory over Scottish club Hearts in the first leg of a Europa League qualifying play-off in August 2012.

A few weeks earlier, Morgan had scored his first goal for the club he grew up supporting in Toronto, during a pre-season tour of North America. Shaun had flown in at short notice and there were tears in the hotel afterwards. The cameras followed the squad around on that trip, filming the infamous Being Liverpool TV documentary, but they did not capture that touching moment.

They did, however, film and broadcast the incident where Sterling was censured by Brendan Rodgers for allegedly telling him to “steady” during a training session. “Sterling,” Rodgers addressed him bluntly. “You say that to me again and you’ll be on the first plane home.” Though Sterling denied that he’d said that word, he was advised that he should follow the example of Morgan, whose attitude during the trip had impressed the new manager.

While Sterling would become a major part of Rodgers’ Liverpool and eventually leave for Manchester City in a British-record deal three summers later, by the time the opening episode of the series was aired in the autumn of 2012 and new expectations came Morgan’s way because of the positivity of the content involving him, his career in reality was already spiralling down.

On Sunday, Sterling returns to Anfield with City, having never won there since his move.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Morgan might make his debut for Widnes, who entertain Workington in the Northern Premier League First Division North-West. Non-League football and agency work helps supplement the income he makes from his dad’s minicab firm, for whom he ferries around the directors and producers of Sky TV crime drama Tin Star, which is currently being shot in Liverpool.

Morgan tells The Athletic his story the morning after Jurgen Klopp’s youngsters have beaten Arsenal on penalties in the Carabao Cup. Neco Williams made his senior debut that night, while Curtis Jones, Rhian Brewster and Caoimhin Kelleher were playing at Anfield for the first time in a competitive game. Their starring roles made him contemplate what happened in Toronto seven years ago. It should really be a positive memory. Yet because it proved to be the ultimate high, it is impossible to ignore the comedown that followed.

“I don’t like to think about it because it upsets me,” he says. “It was a friendly match but to me it meant everything. [Jamie] Carragher ran down the touchline from the bench when I scored because he could relate to it. The feeling was indescribable. You get this rush of emotion. You think, ‘Oh my god. I’ve just scored for Liverpool…’ I completely lost my mind. It was the best feeling in my whole life. If you could bottle that feeling, it would be worth millions of pounds.”

Morgan would make three senior appearances for Liverpool, all in the Europa League, and two of them in that tie against Hearts — one as a late substitute.


Morgan celebrates his pre-season goal in 2012 (Photo: John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Left-footed and from the city, he was compared to Robbie Fowler, the legendary striker who described Morgan as one of the best finishers he’d ever seen in Liverpool’s academy. Morgan realised, indeed, that all strikers are judged on goals and momentum and neither of those elements formed a part of his first-team experiences at Liverpool, who had signed Fabio Borini the month before he made his debut. Despite Rodgers’ comments in Being Liverpool, Morgan knew Sterling was already ahead of him. And then there was the presence of Luis Suarez.

Morgan loves telling a tale about the Uruguayan, who would insist on training the day after matches with the squad members who hadn’t played that weekend, even though he was meant to be at home resting.

“He’d do the 90 minutes on the Saturday then a full session on the Sunday, even though he didn’t have to really turn up again at Melwood until a recovery session on the Monday. He wanted full sessions all of the time,” he says.

“Brendan Rodgers would tell him to rest, but he wouldn’t. Obviously, he’s done some mad things but he was always great with the younger players. I can remember him saying to me as we were walking out against Hearts [Morgan started the second leg at home] in his broken English, ‘Don’t worry.’ That helped settle me down a bit because I can remember in the warm-up looking around Anfield and thinking, ‘Oh my god.’

“All my family were there, all of my mates. I must have had nerves all over my face. While the rest of the squad were still getting ready in the dressing room, putting their tape on, I already had my full kit on with my jacket zipped up, ready to go out. I wish I’d relaxed a bit more. If I knew then it was going to be the last time…

“The thing that hurts me is, I’ll never get that feeling again. I sometimes ask myself, ‘Did I even play for Liverpool?’

“But I did. And I deserved the chance.”

Listen to any of the youth players who shared a pitch with Raheem Sterling and they usually say the same thing. He made their game easier because of the intelligence of his runs. He always seemed to know where to be. What he needed to work on was his passing, crossing and finishing.

Morgan says Sterling was “born with a star on his head” — “if he wanted to become a singer, he’d have been a musical legend”. He stresses, though, it was his determination that set him apart. “He also worked so, so hard. He didn’t have it easy. He had the press outside of football and outside of Liverpool looking at him all the time.

“Apparently, he was going with all sorts of girls, which was never true. He’s one of the nicest and most humble people I’ve ever met in my life. Most people might not expect that because of everything that has been written about him from those who haven’t got the talent of his little toe.

“He has never done anything which made me think, ‘You’re getting too big for your boots here…’ He was a great lad. He was brilliant to have in your team, brilliant to have in your dressing room; always laughing and joking, with a smile on his face. He’d come through some hard times in his life. Now he’s reaping the rewards. I’m delighted for him. He’s never given up.”

Morgan cannot even remember what Sterling supposedly did to infuriate Rodgers that day in 2012. “Maybe the manager got the wrong end of the stick because I’ve never seen Raheem be disrespectful to anyone,” he says. “Or maybe the manager realised what a special talent he was and thought he could make an example of him – sending out a message to the rest of us.”

He thinks the documentary series may have sent out the wrong message about who Sterling really was, setting the agenda around him for years to come. “He was anything but a spoilt brat,” insists Morgan, who in turn found new expectations upon himself.

He was emerging as a Liverpool player at a unique time. Carragher and Steven Gerrard were both coming towards the end of their careers and a yearning existed among the club’s supporter base to find a new local hero. Morgan’s rise through the youth levels had coincided with the emergence of the club’s in-house TV station in 2007. Towards the end of the under-18s’ 2010-11 season, he scored in 12 games in a row and each of those goals got beamed out to a global audience.

Morgan’s fall was ultimately sharper than his rise.

Within six weeks of his debut against Hearts, he saw signs that his future did not lie at Anfield. He was training at Melwood before a League Cup game at West Bromwich Albion. Seventeen names were on the board for the trip, with one space.

He told his dad to drive to the Midlands because he’d probably be on the bench. The next day, Jerome Sinclair and Stephen Sama travelled with the squad, taking it up to 19 players. He figured that Sinclair would be the extra body — just as he’d been several times, available to fill in if someone else got injured.

“Instead, I was the one left out. Straight away I thought, ‘I might not play here again…’”

It was around that time that Rodgers instructed centre-back Martin Skrtel to rough Morgan up in a training session to see how he responded. “I didn’t train well that day,” he reflects. “The manager might have formed an impression that I wasn’t quite up to it physically.”

Morgan says Sterling was the most talented and the hardest working of the players he’s played with or against. Ravel Morrison and Paul Pogba had been rivals in Manchester United’s youth teams. Pogba strutted around the pitch like he owned it but “he didn’t like playing against us. It was, ‘Smash him early doors, then he’s going to go missing.’”

Morrison was instead, “the one by a million miles — a nightmare to play against; so skilful and powerful. He did something in every game. He ripped us apart in the Youth Cup.”

Morgan and Morrison later faced each other as professionals in 2014 when Morgan was at Yeovil Town and Morrison at QPR. In the players’ lounge at Loftus Road after the game, the start of the conversation went something like this: “‘Lad, what are you doing here?’”

Rotherham United came first, a loan move “to get kicked for a couple of months and toughen me up.” Then there was Yeovil, St Johnstone, Accrington Stanley, Hemel Hempstead Town, Colwyn Bay, Curzon Ashton, Halifax Town, Sligo Rovers, Curzon Ashton again, Mossley and now, Widnes. That’s 11 different clubs (one twice) in five years since leaving Liverpool and a CV which might put managers operating at higher levels off from signing him. Surely there have been problems along the way?

“Only really at Yeovil,” Morgan says, where he and the manager Gary Johnson “hated each other.” Stints elsewhere have been because of necessity. Like at Hemel Hempstead, where he stayed for a couple of months in 2016 because he wanted to be closer to his girlfriend Mia, who lives in London. That spell was followed by several weeks at Colwyn Bay in north Wales, an hour from Liverpool, where he scored some spectacular goals but the team was ultimately relegated. “I wanted to finish the season with a club and maintain my fitness so that I was ready for pre-season,” he reasons.

Some decisions have been mistakes. Morgan left Liverpool for Yeovil, who were then in the Championship, even though there was an offer from Nigel Pearson’s Leicester City. “I should have gone to Leicester,” he says. “It was exactly the same contract on exactly the same money, only Yeovil were saying I’d play every week and Leicester were saying I’d start out in the under-21s. I could have gone to Carlisle as well. I just didn’t fancy playing in the under-21s at Leicester. I thought I was ready for first team football.”

Had he joined Leicester, he may have been around for the club’s improbable rise towards the title in 2016. Instead, “everything” went wrong at Yeovil where he was told that he could leave inside six months by Johnson, who said at the time: “Sometimes they [former academy footballers] can come out of the under-21s and still be playing as if there’s no points. Some handle the intensity of it all and some don’t. And, with the ones that don’t you have to try and find them somewhere they’re more comfortable.”

Morgan dreaded going back to Somerset. He had bought a flat in Yeovil but waited until the last possible moment to return. “I think we set off at 11 o’clock at night one time and I was in tears. I was saying to my mum, ‘I can’t do this any more.’ I cried for an hour on the motorway.

“I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I’d been at a club in the Premier League and so quickly in League One, playing for a club in a part of the country which I had no relationship with. I hated living there. I wasn’t playing football. Most of the lads had families and birds. There wasn’t much social life. I’d go home after training and do the same thing every day. Put a little bet on the laptop. Go on the PlayStation. That was two hours… then what?”

On Johnson, he says: “I went to Yeovil with an ankle injury, which he knew about. But he put me straight into the team. Being a young lad, I didn’t want to say no. It started off well, a couple of wins and a draw.”

Morgan was there at the same time as John Lundstram and Shane Duffy, who are both now Premier League regulars with Sheffield United and Brighton & Hove Albion. “I don’t think the manager liked any of us. We’d all come through the system at the Merseyside clubs,” he says. “I was made to train alone for four or five months. I was fitter than I’ve ever been, because I was in the gym all the time. Effectively, I was getting paid to go the gym.”

He agreed to join St Johnstone on loan for the wrong reasons. He could have gone instead to fellow Scottish side Hibernian, where Alan Stubbs — another Scouser — was the manager. He chose St Johnstone because they promised him time off during the international breaks that meant he’d be able to travel to London to see Mia.

When that loan move was cut short and he returned to Yeovil, their new manager Terry Skiverton gave him another chance. Yet the club was on the verge of a second relegation in as many seasons. He had joined them in November 2013 as a Championship club. Now, 18 months later, they were dropping into League Two. His contract did not stipulate that he had to take a cut in wages. This meant Yeovil had another reason to get rid of him.

When Morgan’s contract was paid up, he sought some familiarity by joining Accrington, where the manager was fellow Liverpudlian John Coleman.

“He could tell straight away I wasn’t right. My head was all over the place anyway, then my granddad died. Coley was great with me about that,” he says.

“When we played Bury in the Football League Trophy, I was meant to play 90 minutes but I had the worst game in my life. He brought me off after 55 minutes. I was struggling badly. I went to him and told him I wanted to leave and have a break from football to get my head straight. I think Coley was going to let me go anyway. I could understand why. I wouldn’t have played me at that time.”

Since leaving Liverpool, it had felt like he was “constantly getting kicked in the face — in less than two and a half years, I’d gone from playing for Liverpool at Anfield to the bottom of League Two. I’d experienced a massive high but it was followed by a low that went lower, lower, lower and lower. It got to the stage where I didn’t give a **** about what happened to me.”

Counselling sessions helped, some of which were paid for by Jack Robinson – a team-mate at Liverpool since the age of 10, who is now Nottingham Forest’s left-back. It saddens Morgan that the pair have since fallen out after a “stupid argument”, because he is grateful to him.

Football still gave him comfort because in the small moments, it allowed him to feel normal. Scoring goals reminded him of the old feelings at Liverpool when he was on his way up. Then he’d look around, see the state of the pitch and the standard of the competition and remember where he was, bringing him down again.

When Morgan signed a three-year contract at Liverpool aged 18, he was on £800 a week in his first season. He would leave half way through the last, when the terms of the deal meant he was receiving nearly £4,000 a month.

“I’ve never been on big, big money, ever. I was on more money at Yeovil than I was at Liverpool, where the bonuses were massive but only if you played,” he says. “There were lads coming in from elsewhere on five times my money and they never kicked a ball for the under-21s, never mind training with the first team. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I loved Liverpool. I still do.”

Though it allowed him to buy a house in Liverpool, his early career in football did not deliver a nest-egg. When he created national headlines by scoring a hat-trick for Curzon Ashton against AFC Wimbledon in the FA Cup in December 2016, he was on £220 a week, plus a £20 goal bonus.


Morgan heads in for Curzon Ashton against Wimbledon in that 2016 FA Cup tie (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Football remained his only income at that point so when Halifax offered £570 a week to travel a little further for games – promising a rise to £770 a week if the team earned promotion to the National League, he could not ignore it, even if he might have benefitted from the staying at Curzon, where he felt valued.

He has learnt that careers spent outside the Championship mean an uncertain financial future for the majority of players. Those who fall into non-League and still consider themselves professional find that the demands are tough and schedules get in the way of other potential income streams.

Morgan left Accrington in the months after Sterling went to City and since then, he has spent most of his time in the top three divisions of the non-League pyramid. The levels of commitment in the National League, National League North and Northern Premier League is beyond the understanding of most people, involving a level of fitness that is greater than it has ever been as well as lots of travel for relatively poor pay.

If a player combines part-time football with a full-time job, he needs a sympathetic employer because of the kick-off times, especially midweek when away games can take players halfway across the country – eating into work time across two days because of the length of some of the bus journeys.

Morgan signed for Mossley in the summer because he’d worked with their assistant manager at Curzon Ashton. Initially, he travelled to home games with two of his old friends from the Liverpool days, Craig Roddan and Lewis Hatch.

In rush hour traffic, the journey from Liverpool to Mossley, which is located near Oldham on the far side of Manchester, could last up to 90 minutes. This meant “walloping down pasta” in the car and somehow getting his kit on. He didn’t always have a warm-up for 7.45pm kick offs. When Hatch and Roddan found combining the travel with their jobs too much, Morgan decided to move closer to home by signing for Widnes.

“I’ve always put football first put that has to change,” Morgan says. “In the past, I’ve thought to myself, ‘If I score 25 goals in the National League North, I’ll get my big move.’ But it hasn’t worked, maybe it was a pipe dream.”

He describes this period as transitional.

Aside from the income he makes working with his dad, he has started to explore his options in the football agency world with his former representatives, Stellar Group, whose offices are next door to the business operation of Liverpool FC.

“Playing football could jeopardise my opportunities,” he thinks. “If you play on Saturday, you can’t work on a Saturday — a job that might have a longer-term future. I’d like to go out and watch players but I can’t do that properly if I’m playing myself. I still love the footy but I’ve got to think of the bigger picture. Otherwise, by the time I turn 30, I’ll have no future.”

I don't get it. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him because he didn't make it??

He took up a profession (if you'd call it that) where the "miss" rate is astronomically high, inevitably didn't make it and now he has to get another job and enjoy the daily grind like the 90 odd percent of society have to do.

[Harv]

I admire certain aspects of what they're trying to do, but it really is ripe for parody. See that article when a Spurs writer got Clive Allen in his car and they drove to every London club Allen played for in one day and then he wrote a biblical article about it.

I mean, why?

"For my latest 10,000 word piece in The Athletic, I sat down with Rory Delap and we took our NVQ level 3 in Plumbing and Domestic Heating - read more on www.theathletic.com"

Plenty of opportunities for few wingnut jokes in there too.

[Assassin]

Plenty of opportunities for few wingnut jokes in there too.

Franny Jeffers

[Exiled_red]

Harry Kewell being linked with the Hibs managers job

[Irishnev]

Pretty easy 20/20 but a 5 min distraction pre game

[ame="https://twitter.com/stehoare/status/1193476317288816640"]https://twitter.com/stehoare/status/1193476317288816640[/ame]

[Exiled_red]

19/20 I missed the side on one as I just had to guess at it

[Fivex]

15

Surprised myself actually

[Norbs]

18, *really* surprised myself

[Fosterbloke]

Scott Carson. On the bench for City in 45 minutes!!!

[Norbs]

Gap toothed cunt