A few months ago, TLW started a series looking at the progress of young midfielder Tyler Morton who is spending the season on loan at Blackburn.
Thanks to the excellent insight of Ian Herbert from @brfcs.dot.com, he talked about the exciting progress he had made in the first few months of the new season.
The Championship is the ultimate in testing your mettle physically and mentally and with any player who is making their way in senior Football, you are going to have your peaks and troughs throughout a gruelling campaign.
And that has recently been the case with the 20 year-old who in January put pen to paper on a long-term contract with the Reds.
The beauty about Ian’s insight is that he does not sugar-coat anything, he tells it as he see it and makes you feel like you are observing Tyler's performances first-hand.
Tyler Morton - so how’s it going then ?
Back in October 2022 just after a terrific 3-0 home win over Rotherham United at Ewood I penned (Penned ? Who am I kidding ?) I typed a piece waxing lyrical as to the positive impact that young Tyler Morton was having in his initial appearances in a Rovers shirt. It wasn’t just me in fairness. The http://www.BRFCS.com Man of the Match for that game was the aforementioned Tyler Morton who with a score of 8.4 seemed to be clearly winning over the Ewood faithful.
They say that those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. Well, in the football realm, for managers, the equivalent is receiving the Manager of the Month award; which by tradition ushers in impending doom. For Tyler Morton, it was being the recipient of that Man of the Match award !
The following Tuesday night Rovers turned in an all too familiar ragged performance away to Wigan, capped off by a ridiculously sloppy piece of possession forfeiture by young Morton on the edge of his own penalty area. Wigan immediately scored the winner of course and at that precise point you sense that the Liverpool prospect realised that it wasn’t all going to be plain sailing.
From those scores you can gauge that the whole team was certainly having “one of those nights” and Tyler obviously wanted to assimilate with his new teammates.
Everyone is entitled to a bad day at the office every now & then. Who amongst us can truly say that they have never slacked off at 4pm on a Friday afternoon before slamming down the laptop lid in anticipation of the weekend ? Just me ? Oh come on…
The difference in my line of work is that I don’t have roughly 15,000 people watching me every time I log on and scrutinising every aspect of my performance on many and various social media platforms. Neither do I have spectators authoring pieces like this trying to explain my ineffectiveness in the monthly team meeting last Wednesday.
The response to the awful performance at Wigan was a run of four successive wins and it seemed that game was after all, merely a blip. In each of those games Morton’s form and contribution recovered and optimism was returning to Ewood.
November was a short month due to the impending World Cup and the last game before that break saw Rovers turn in a performance that was so limp and weak-willed, had it been a dog, even the RSPCA would have advocated euthanasia as being truly the kindest act to avoid more pain & suffering. In that game, Tyler, along with his fellow midfielders Travis & Hedges scored 10 on the http://BRFCS.com ratings-meter. Sorry, I should clarify - not 10 each…10 shared between them.
Since that capitulation, Rovers have struggled to regain any sort of a spark and Morton has found himself becoming less and less of a positive influence. He has given the ball away in dangerous areas repeatedly and his over-elaboration and undue deliberation has been noted. The pace at which he wants to play isn’t always what is required, especially in matches where Rovers have conceded first and some sort of impetus is required.
Since that break, many Rovers watchers have started to query the small print of the loan deal wondering if in it, the selection of Morton is in fact a contractual obligation. Many loan deals have fees attached which are based for example upon the number of appearances made - more appearances, lower fee - in order to protect the parent club & loanee’s interests.
If that is the case here, even Tomasson’s patience eventually snapped. In the cup game against Birmingham another sloppy cross-field pass in front of his own penalty area cost a goal and Morton found himself omitted from the 1st XI for the replay.
He won his place back for the league game at Watford but the only Rovers player scoring lower than him in the Match Centre was the seemingly Villarreal-bound Ben Brereton-Diaz who is now 13 games without a goal and looks to all the world like he has tuned out of Rovers plight.
What does all of this tell us ? Let us consider at this point the lyrics of “The Whole Of The Moon”, the Waterboys classic track…
You stretched for the stars
And you know how it feels
To reach too high
Too far too soon
The boy clearly has talent, but the Championship is a tough-old league and there are plenty of opponents, in every game, capable of exploiting any player who isn’t 100% on it all the time.
If he can assemble a run of solid, dependable performances, where doing the simpler, less risky thing builds his confidence back up, this may allow him the latitude to try more adventurous passing. It would be good to see him speed up his distribution and be prepared to drive forward more.
If he can’t add those attributes to this Rovers team, then realistically many Rovers fans, myself included, would rather see us invest in our own promising academy prospects before rehabilitating one from a Premier League powerhouse, contract clauses notwithstanding.
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