I’m starting to get really confused about the whole Ravel Morrison situation. With him set to go on loan to Championship side QPR tomorrow for the remainder of the season, it’s left me wondering what has gone wrong with the player who was just a few months ago being hailed as our future and a contender for a place in the World Cup squad.
On one side, I’m not his biggest fan. To me, he has had some bright moments but that doesn’t mean he can be selfish on the ball and I don’t think he is always as good as he thinks he is. It’s been reported that he thinks he should be on much higher wages, putting him on a par with more senior players at the club, but I think he needs to prove himself more before this happens.
There is also some mystery around his apparent ‘groin injury.’ Big Sam has said that medical staff have passed him as fit to play but he is still complaining of pain in the area. However, if he goes on loan to QPR as is reported, I bet he’ll go straight into their first team.
Big Sam told the Independent: “He says he feels it occasionally. Instead of gritting your teeth and getting on with it… he’s not the type. Lots and lots of players throughout the country will be playing with a similar type of injury that the medical team say ‘you can carry on, it’s not a problem’.”
He added: “You have a lot of other players that are challenging his (Morrison’s) position and doing a better job than him. I’m always disappointed if no one gives me selection problems.”
To me, his comments reveal an underlying frustration with Morrison, and it would definitely seem like he was having a dig at the midfielder for his apparent lack of commitment and fight. It would appear that those attitude problems at Manchester United and Birmingham City maybe resurfacing…
There have also been rumours circulating for a while that the reason he wants to leave is because Big Sam and some of the players have been pressuring him to swap agents to the same one Allardyce and them are linked to. This is allegedly being brought up at training every day, with Daniel Taylor from the Guardian reporting:
‘Towards the end of last year, Morrison was invited to a meeting with the football agent Mark Curtis to see if he wanted to become one of his clients. Curtis does this a fair bit with Allardyce’s players. At West Ham, he either represents or has links with Allardyce, Kevin Nolan, James Tomkins, Jack Collison, Matt Jarvis, Andy Carroll, Jussi Jaaskelainen and Adrian. Look through his history and there is a fairly astounding pattern of players signing up to him from Allardyce teams.
Morrison was not keen but, since then, his complaint is that he has felt under considerable pressure from Allardyce and Nolan to change his mind, claiming it is brought up on an almost daily basis. His grievance is that he wanted to go into training to learn and improve, not to have endless conversations about an agent he did not want to employ.’
I also heard that Morrison had worn a wire in a meeting with Allardyce regarding this agent, but whether that is true or not remains to be seen!
I honestly am at a loss as to what is going on and whether it is Ravel who is at fault or the club. As I previously mentioned, I haven’t been hugely impressed with some of his play, but if he is only not featuring because of this agent situation, that’s quite frankly ridiculous.
To me, there’s something more than meets the eye going on here, and I wish there was some more transparency as to what it is. What do you think of Morrison going on loan to QPR? It’ll certainly be interesting to see how him and Joey Barton get on! Leave me a comment or tweet me at @alwaysintune.
Am I the only one who actually likes Allerdyce , Ok it’s not pretty football , it’s not the ‘West Ham Way’ he can be a bit arrogant at times … But he gets results and sets up a well Organised, physical team . We were well unlucky with injurys in the first half of the season , and end of Jan we had our full first team available , we haven’t the money to be competing with the likes of Chelsea where money don’t matter, but we can bully them , rough them up and frustrate them. And most teams now play with one up top , we haven’t sung a managers name since Arry Redknapps claret and blue army , I for one support Sam he’s a no non-cence manager who has been around for a long time , and can keep a team in the Prem with a bit of grit and fight , also on this Ravel get rid no player is bigger than the club , if Sir Alex Ferguson couldn’t deal with him he’s obviously trouble don’t need that around the team right now , get rid
Google Allardyce and Curtis. Doesn’t take long to bring up the dodgy deals.
Allardyce has made some pretty poor signings since taking over , but the best of the lot , is now on his way out , he’s basically a young gun finding his way in life , we’re paying him peanuts to what joe cole is getting and he’s well past his sell buy date. He obviously has more natural takent than any other WH player since Di canio . They should be bending over backwards. To make this work for the future of WH , for this kid will mature and probably end up a 50M £ player , how sad will we look then .