Sam

Samy Sayed Morsy’s last act as a Middlesbrough player was to get sent off. Raising his foot for a fifty-fifty with Blackburn’s Tyler Magloire, he went slightly over the ball and caught his opponent, earning a straight red card for what the referee deemeed an out-of-control tackle. Before he could feature for Boro again, he was sold to Ipswich Town. Between then and now he’s accumulated 40 yellow cards and one retrospective red in 106 appearances for the Blues.

Yesterday, virtually his first act in his return to the Riverside after being rudely discarded was to wipe out young Morgan Rogers, escaping with a lecture rather than the card he probably deserved. He finally got that yellow just before the final whistle blew, apparently for kicking the ball away.

If you only had this information to hand you would probably get a distorted sense of why Sam Morsy is so beloved at Ipswich Town. You would look at him topping the charts for fouls in the Championship and assume it was a fairly standard cult of the midfield ratter. The destroyer, the guy who brutalises the opposition, who “gets into em and fucks em up”. A player where petulance and a lack of emotional control is getting read as “passion”. It's probably what every other Championship club’s fans imagine they're facing when they see our “workmanlike, journeyman midfield”.

Even if you saw him play, you might continue to assume some of those things. Standing at a stout 5’9” and without explosive pace, you could imagine aggression compensating for other physical gifts. Nor would watching his play necessarily give an instantaneous impression of great technical ability. At first look the control, passing, dribbling, is more function than grace.

But these are superficial things. The more closely you watch him, the more elegance you can discern in Sam Morsy. Watching videos of him before he joined, I might have muttered something about him looking “press resistant” without really working out how. It only gradually dawns on you watching him week after week that he has this acute awareness of relative body position. He pulls the same move on the half turn over and over, feinting, holding his marker in place, arm locking him the wrong side of the defender, before swivelling, accelerating away. Opposing midfielders presumably know what’s happening to them every time this occurs, but there they are, still trailing in his wake.

Sometimes you get to enjoy watching him pass neatly, unfussily, through the lines or shuffling the ball wide, moving opposition teams about. You note the tactical awareness in the runs he chooses to make and in the neat one-twos that push him and his mate Luongo through the midfield. There’s also a pretty effective lofted through ball that comes out now and then, as well as a very good shot from distance that looks a bit too flashy to belong with the rest of his game.

The real joy is in watching him tip toe his way through a thicket of attempted tackles, then seeming to sort of amble, shuffle, into space and then speed away, looking for all the world like he shouldn’t be fast enough to eat up ground and leave his marker in the dust like that. Like all the best centre midfielders, he has this little forcefield, as if there were a rule where no one is permitted within two metre radius of him, every blade of grass his personal property.

There was one moment against Middlesbrough where their press smelled blood, thought their moment had finally come to pinch possession off him. He carried the ball out of a messy passage of play, tackles flying in. He turned back out of trouble, the experienced Johnny Howson following him down a dark alley and getting mugged for his troubles. Morsy swiveled left, leaving Howson grasping at air, before another red shirt appeared, the brawny Matt Crooks, Morsy pivoted away again, re-establishing his shield, before manipulating the ball through an ephemeral gap past the rapidly approaching Emmanuel Latte Lath and finally away to safety.

Untouchable. He was untouchable almost every week in League One, he still is in the Championship. You knew the game with Middlesbrough would be big, especially for him. This foolish club which made the ludicrous decision to discard Sam Morsy. Anyone else you would worry it was too much to keep his equilibrium, but the fire in him seems to almost always be controlled. It’s calculated fury not unbridled rage.

Had his play been just a touch easier on the eye you wonder if he might have long ago had chances at the highest level. He has that elite aura. The last Ipswich player to have it was Jim Magilton. That demanding, serious glare. That particular driven personality that has no patience, suffers no fools, gives no quarter. Sometimes you get the impression he maintains possession of the football through pure charismatic energy. It was a strange juxtaposition when you saw him playing with his daughter before the Exeter game last season, his intensity all the more apparent when you briefly saw him switch it off.  

This is the type of person who transforms a football club. You can recruit a lot of very talented footballers without ever finding the ones that simply demand everything about the club match their level of excellence. We recruited Sam aged 29 and you instantly wanted to see him play another 250 games for us, well into his thirties. You suspect that 50 per cent of Kieran McKenna’s early battle at Ipswich Town was won as soon as Sam bought into the project. Who was going to contradict him? Thanks to Middlesbrough’s carelessness, McKenna found a hugely important part of the jigsaw sitting there waiting for him.

This makes the discussion of how to find backup for his now almost inevitable absences through suspension all the more impossible. A football club can recruit for skills and attributes. It can look for footballers who can do certain things at certain levels. It can, to an certain extent, recruit for good personalities and exceptional work ethics. But I’m not sure it can recruit for “intangible charismatic auras”. At Ipswich Town Sam Morsy sets the tempo and sets the standard. In that, he may be truly irreplaceable.

Sam Morsy v Middlesbrough

Minutes 90

Accurate passes 62/69 (90%)

Total shots 1

Touches 87

Successful dribbles 1/1 (100%)

Passes into final third 6

Accurate long balls 3/5 (60%)

Tackles won 3/6 (50%)

Recoveries 5

Ground duels won 9/10 (90%)

Aerial duels won 0/1

Was fouled 2

Fouls 2