There can be few more remarkable or rapid rises over the last five years than Joe Morrell’s. Shortly after his 20th birthday he was loaned out by Bristol City to Margate, rooted to the bottom of National League South, the fifth tier of English football. Morrell admits that at that point he barely thought of himself as a professional footballer. Two-and-a-half years later, he was playing for his senior national team alongside Gareth Bale. Fast forward another two-and-a-half years and he was starting every game for Wales at the European Championship.
Now 25, Morrell is at Portsmouth in League One. He has still only played 11 times at Championship level and yet has become a key member of the Wales team that reached the play-offs and aims to reach the World Cup finals for the first time in 64 years.
With 25 caps, Morrell’s career seems upside down: club form usually propels an international career but for him it has been the opposite. If hard work and hard times makes the man and makes the player, he knows plenty of both.
“I’ve had some very low times as a footballer and therefore as a person because you become so engrossed in the job,” he tells i from Wales’ training camp. “I got so low. Margate were bottom of the league but they were the only club that would take me. I signed for them on loan and on the same afternoon the manager got sacked.
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Morrell is happy to admit that luck plays a part. He speaks of the countless academy players who are desperate for a chance to make the grade but never get one and understands that things sometimes fall in certain ways. When he was loaned to Cheltenham Town in League Two a year later, one of the club’s central midfielders fell ill on the morning of a match and Morrell was called up to start. He stayed in the team for the rest of the season. From there, Lincoln City in League One were his final loan destination.
But it goes beyond pure luck. Morrell clearly needed talent, but he’s also acutely aware that hard work and industry on the pitch can help you stand out. He believes that provides the basis for his Wales career. In front of the defence, it is his job to allow better players to shine – the water carrier for a team that fights way above its weight division.
“Ultimately, as in every industry it comes down to taking chances when they come and showing that you’re worthy of the opportunities you have been granted,” he says. “I’ve got 25 caps now and if I didn’t do well on my debut that would never have happened. I like to think that I can be dependable, but I’m happy to admit that I had a slight imposter syndrome when I first arrived in the Wales camp. That’s something I’m working on.
“I know not I’m not a fashionable player. I know I haven’t played for massive clubs in big, big games like many have here. I can even understand that supporters might be disappointed if I’m playing. But you know, my job in the team is just to give everything to make it easier for everyone else. And I feel like I’ve done a decent job of that over the last three or four years.”
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The modern rise of this Wales team has clearly been built around several pillars, the names that even a casual observer could name: Bale, Ramsey, Allen, Davies. But it is all founded upon a shared humility, a deliberate intention to demonstrate that, when they all get together, there are no egos. There are no Real Madrid players, Tottenham players, Juventus players or Manchester United players, no cliques, only a group of Welshmen. As a group of individuals from a country of three million people, they are also-rans. As a collective united behind one goal and a desperate desire to achieve it, they are contenders.
The identity of the country plays a huge role in that. In the past, when coaching and facilities and the general mood generated a subservience to the club game, Wales’ players may have felt less connected to their national team and therefore their country than now. A revolution that started under Gary Speed and is maintained in memory of the great man’s life guarantees a patriotism that really does make Wales bigger than the sum of its sporting parts. Ten minutes before the Austria match, the rest of the world gets to witness that through the medium of one song.
“The anthem is just fantastic,” Morrell says. “I’m not naming any names, but I think some anthems aren’t synonymous with certain countries. Wales is something else. The pride you see in the stands and on the pitch during those few minutes, when everyone Welsh in that stadium will have tears in their eyes, you can’t manufacture that and you can’t replicate it. All the history, all the frustration, all the hard time spent following us from country to country, comes out.”
For Morrell, Thursday night will be an awkward experience. Thanks to Uefa’s nonsensical rules (two yellow cards in the group stage equals a ban), he will be suspended for the semi-final against Austria after being booked against Belgium. His great hope is that his squad-mates and friends get it done and give him a shot of a play-off final in Cardiff that could take them to the World Cup.
For a young man who believed his career was never likely to get started and yet who stands on the edge of an achievement that an entire country feared would never come, you suspect that Morrell will accept the two hours of nerves. The miles, the hard work, the loans and the setbacks; it was all for this.
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