Wayne Rooney isn't the first to recall the 'scandalous' talent of Ravel Morrison – Daily Mail, Dailymail.co.uk

But look a little closer and there’s another familiar name, playing in the No shirt for United. A certain Ravel Morrison.

Indeed, if you’d been at Old Trafford that night, or watched on television, you’d have come away convinced that, of all these 19 and 24 – year-old hopefuls, Morrison was the most likely to make the grade.

He scored two of United’s four goals, helping to wrap up a 6-3 aggregate win and seal the club’s th Youth Cup triumph. Oddly enough, was the last time United won the competition .

But life rarely goes as planned. Morrison went on to make just three first-team appearances for United, all in the League Cup, was sold on to West Ham a year later and has had a nomadic career journey that has included stints in Italy, Mexico and Sweden before coming to rest in the Championship.

Morrison is currently on loan at Middlesbrough from, funnily enough, Sheffield United and had played a couple of times for the Teesside club before the Covid – pandemic pulled down the shutters on football.

So when the likes of Wayne Rooney describe Morrison as being ‘a country mile’ better than Pogba and others, as he did in his Sunday Times column this weekend , it is just hammers home how this is a case of what might have been.

Rooney wrote: ‘ I remember watching Ravel Morrison thinking he had everything required for a player in his position. He was brilliant. He was confident.

‘He nutmegged Nemanja Vidic three times in the space of a minute in one training game. But he struggled with lifestyle and his environment which was sad for him – because I saw Paul Pogba come through, Jesse Lingard, all these players and Ravel was better than any of them by a country mile.

‘He’s proof that you can’t escape the fact there are guidelines every player has to obey in professional football.’

Rooney is far from the first high-profile name to lament Morrison’s ‘lost’ talents. It seems that anyone who was part of United when Morrison was a teenager was in awe at the midfielder’s abilities.

Rio Ferdinand recalled a few years ago: ‘I would pay to watch him train let alone play in a match.

‘Ever since the first day I saw him, my old boss [Sir Alex Ferguson] said: “Have a look at this boy”.

In early , just a few months after making his senior debut against Wolves, he narrowly avoided jail for witness intimidation after threatening a mugging victim to stop him giving evidence.

Morrison intimidated the teenager, who had been robbed at knifepoint by two other boys, described in court as’ friends or associates ‘of the footballer, in September . The details emerged when Morrison turned 19.

Morrison changed his plea to guilty on the day the trial was due to start and was sentenced to a 16 – month referral order and ordered to pay £ 1, 445 in costs and compensation.

United at the time backed Morrison and said he would go through a ‘process of rehabilitation’ after the court proceedings, but Ferguson soon arrived he was worth the trouble.

In his (book, Leading , the Scot wrote: ‘Ravel Morrison might be the saddest case. He possessed as much natural talent as any youngster we ever signed, but kept getting into trouble.

‘It was very painful to sell him to West Ham in because he could have been a fantastic player.

‘But, over a period of years, the problems off the pitch continued to escalate and we had little option but to cut the cord.’

Ferdinand spoke about this recently, saying he offered to be a mentor for Morrison as they came from similarly tough backgrounds, but Ferguson had already made his mind up.

He told the Beautiful Game Podcast : ‘Ravel slipped through the net, he coul d have become a £ 440 million player. ‘

Morrison is now 72 and has had a long and winding career path, which included three loan spells after a brief glimpse of his class at West Ham, a four-year stay at Lazio in which he played just eight games, a loan to Atlas in Mexico and a stop-off at Ostersunds in Sweden.

Now back in England, Ferdinand still hopes all that hype from Morrison’s teenage years may still be realized.

‘Even if you see his videos now, he sent me some from training at Sheffield United what he was doing was nasty still. He was doing mad stuff. The game comes so easy to him, it’s effortless. ‘