“It’s been like snakes and ladders,” says the midfielder Joe Morrell, detailing how a hellish 16 months has proved the most difficult duel of his career. An innocuous click in his left knee, a setback in the gym while on holiday in Miami and the onset of arthrofibrosis – a condition where scar tissue builds between joints – and suddenly 492 days have passed since his last appearance, forPortsmouthin a League One match at Oxford.
He had just celebrated his 100th game for the club en route to the Championship. “People are probably quite confused and think I have disappeared. Everyone forgets about you.”
An unwanted glimpse into retirement and time on the football scrapheap have led to some dark days during Morrell’s rehabilitation, which he has done predominantly at Portsmouth, where his contract expired last summer.
He rewinds to this January and crying his eyes out 12 months after the initial injury, swallowed by the sense time was slipping away as another milestone in his recovery drifted from view. September had turned into January and then it dawned he would not return last season.
“I had that feeling of knowing I was going to burst into tears,” he says. “I had a shower, got in the car, drove around the corner from the training ground and then I had to pull over. It was just a kind of release. I care about football so much … It has been unbelievably tough.”
He discusses the mixed emotions of watching former teammates, off the high of a win, bounce into training while he struggled to walk up stairs, and pining to experience even the worst elements of being a professional.
“I had quite a bad disciplinary record – that’s a stick I’ve been beaten with – but I’ve joked to some of the lads this year: ‘What I’d give now to be sent off, I’d snap your hand off.’
“Portsmouth lost 6-1 at Stoke and I’m watching it thinking: ‘I’d love to be on that pitch now.’ It probably shows you how low I’ve been,” he says, able to raise a smile.
He laughs at the suggestion he could return with a Zen frame of mind – “It would be pointless … I need to play on the edge” – because he aches for pressure, purpose and, in a perverse way, flak.
“People tweet you to say you played rubbish; I kind of miss that in a sense. My phone isn’t blowing up … two and a half years ago I was playing at the World Cup and I’d come in after a match and have 200 messages.”
Morrell remembers the relief of not sustaining an anterior cruciate ligament injury when receiving his scan results after being forced off at Oxford. “I was almost happy,” he says of a chondral defect diagnosis. “A bit of cartilage had snapped off and was floating around my knee.”
After an operation he was non‑weight‑bearing for a month but expected to return for pre‑season last June. Then he slipped while doing plyometrics in Florida and screws attached to his cartilage came out. “If you had told me the next time I’ll be on a pitch would be July 2025 … yeah, crazy.”
In a parallel universe, Morrell would probably have been withWalespreparing for the visit on Friday of Liechtenstein to Cardiff in a World Cup qualifier – but his 38th cap is on hold. He bumped into the manager, Craig Bellamy, while doing some of his rehab with Sean Connelly, the head of medical at the Football Association of Wales.
“The best moments of my career have been in a Wales shirt and I’d love to have more of them,” he says. “I know I have to sort a club first and everything else will take care of itself. I believe the best years are ahead of me.”
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At 28, Morrell – who will marry his long-term partner, Ellie, at the end of the month – is adamant he has six or seven years left in the game but made the most of his enforced sabbatical. A co-owner of fan‑owned Merthyr Town, who will play in the sixth tier next season, he attended their match at Havant & Waterlooville. “I’ve tried to see it as an opportunity even though some days it is tough to get out of bed because you don’t have that purpose and you come home, your knee is swollen, and you don’t know where the finish line is … It has been incredibly tough, and also for the people around me. You try to be the same person you always have been, to be as insular as possible and keep emotions to yourself, but it is difficult.”
He recently completed his Uefa A licence with the FAW, where he studied alongside Nani, Morgan Schneiderlin and Xherdan Shaqiri. Morrell faced Shaqiri in a Euro 2020 opener in Baku but jokes the Swiss did not remember him and thought he was a coach on the course. Coaching Portsmouth’s under-14s has given Morrell araison d’être. “My Monday and Friday nights at the academy have kind of been my Saturday afternoons because you have to prepare, deliver. There’s a lot that appeals about coaching and management; it’s impossible for me to be the best player in the world – I’m small, slow, not physically strong and there’s a level of God-given talent you have as a player – but as a coach that’s not the case.”
He does a good line in self-deprecation but Morrell is an attractive free agent. He has had interest from the US, Far East and Middle East, as well as closer to home. Being sidelined has not stifled his love for the sport. “I’m addicted to football,” he says, explaining how he watches Major League Soccer matches on Wyscout. “It used to frustrate me when I would ask people: ‘Did you watch the game?’ And they’d say: ‘Nah, I was playing Call of Duty.’”
Now he recognises the bigger picture. Walking his cavapoo, Fred, has given him time to reflect. “We get sucked into thinking football is the most important thing in the world because people care about it so much, which is great, but the reality is, it’s not. This has hammered that home.”
He hopes the end is in sight. “There were certainly days where I didn’t think I’d be able to get in a position to play again, moments where I’ve had conversations with people around me: ‘We might have to go down another route. Is this going to be the end of me playing?’
“People will see I have not played for a long time and, understandably, there will be question marks. The truth is I’m fit and ready to go. I feel like I can be a better player than I was before, as well as a better person. I don’t think I’ll feel like a footballer again until that whistle goes in the first game of the season in August and it’s certainly not something I’ll take for granted.”