Neil Warnock’s mad Crystal Palace methods revealed by Clinton Morrison

Clinton Morrison admitted he “couldn’t stand” Neil Warnock when he first played for him but came to want to “run through a brick wall for that man.”

Warnock and Morrison crossed paths when the manager stepped into the Crystal Palace dugout in 2007 with the South London club in the Championship.

Morrison meanwhile was 28 and had already been at the club for six years over the course of two stints and admitted he was not very happy with the new man in charge.

“At the start, I didn’t like him. I couldn’t stand him when he first came into the football club,” Morrison told Planet Football courtesy of BetSelect.co.uk.

“He was like, ‘We’re gonna have a 10 v 10, and everyone’s got to put shin pads on,’ and he’d kick balls up into the air, and he wanted everyone to smash people and go back to being a horrible team. And I was like, this is not for me.

“The first few games, he didn’t play me because I wasn’t buying into what he was doing. Then eventually he did play me, and I had one of my best seasons. He made me work harder off the ball and made me score a lot of goals. So I give him full credit.”

Warnock’s methods clearly worked as he saved the club from relegation down to League One and while he was unable to achieve promotion, he is credited for guiding the club during their worst financial period in recent memory.

And even after Morrison’s initial hesitancy, he soon turned into the example Warnock wanted to show to the rest of his squad.

“He’d have the youth team come in every Friday, and they’d watch my weekend goals,” Morrison continued. “He’d have the strikers watching and saying, ‘Look at Clinton, where is he in and around the six-yard box?’ They said, ‘How come the ball is always [falling] to him?’ And he said, ‘It’s instinct.’

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“So he kind of made me a role model for the youngsters. It’s crazy because when we first met, I didn’t think I could play for him. But you’d run through a brick wall for that man, because he makes you feel six feet tall.”

For as much as Warnock is famous for his achievements on the pitch, he is almost as famous for what he was like off it and Morrison recalled the “mad stories” he used to hear about his former gaffer and the “worst place ever” the team used to go to for pre-season.

“I think he had calmed down when he came to Palace,” Morrison suggested. “At Sheffield United, you heard all the mad stories about him. But he’s still as mad as anything and would crack a joke. Pre-season, we’d usually go abroad or somewhere in the sunshine.

“He’d always take us down to where he lives, in the worst place ever, doing army stuff. But it was character-building, so I can’t really knock him, because you don’t get a successful career like Neil Warnock’s without character-building.

“Even recently, I worked on TV with him. We had a Sky game, and I was like, what’s that noise? We were live on air, and he answered the phone. I said, ‘Gaffer, you can’t do that, we’re live on air.’

“He said, ‘No, my wife’s just telling me my collar’s not fixed right, so I’ve got to fix my collar.’ I said, ‘What a guy’.

“Things like that, he’ll never change, and that’s why I’ve got so much time for him.”

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