Glenn Morris has a haul of personal accolades – but promotion is something that he’s determined to taste one last time before retirement.
Goalkeeper Morris finished the season with the supporters’ player-of-the-season award – the second time he’s scooped the top award at the end of a season with Gillingham, those awards coming after taking the fans’ accolade four times at former club Crawley Town.
But it’s a promotion challenge that’s got the 41-year-old keeper buzzing for another season at the Gills, having only once before achieved it, when he helped Leyton Orient to League 2 success in 2006.
Morris said: “It’s nice to win these awards and obviously, when you look back, when you stop playing, you go, ‘Yeah, that was a good achievement’ but it’d be nice if we won that collective team award of a promotion.
“Promotion with Leyton Orient is my only one in 24 years – they don’t come around very often! I think I played about 10 games, and It was good to be around, we had a promotion party and went to Las Vegas.
“It’s always an ambition, you’d love to do it, but it’s been difficult. I was at Crawley for a long period, and really our aim, with what we had then, was to stay in the Football League; that was an achievement in itself.
“I was there for seven seasons, and maybe six of them were relegation fights, so to stay up was almost like a promotion, really.
“I’ve had no relegations, that’s not bad, and I’ve missed out on some promotions. I was at Southend one year, where we got 83 points and we finished fourth, one point behind Crawley in third, and we lost out [to Crewe] in the play-offs.
“I was injured for the last two months of that season and came back for the play-offs but was on the bench. It was a bit hard to not play in the play-offs. To not get promoted that season when you got so many points was a difficult one to take.
“That’s football, ups and downs, highs and lows all the time, but luckily I’ve stayed away from injury problems, nothing major, and I think that’s what’s helped me to carry on.”
The Gills were among the favourites for success in League 2 this season but after a bright start the team fell away and finished 17th.
“It’s not easy, nobody has a given right to do it,” said the experienced keeper.
“Salford are another team that have probably found it more difficult than they thought.
“We’ve had a couple of scares, really, and it could have been a lot worse, which is the way I look at it. You’ve just got to be consistent throughout the whole season, that’s the key to success.”
Morris recently signed a new one-year contract to stay at the Gills, one of two players along with Robbie McKenzie to get it sorted early. Four others have been in contract talks since the end of the season.
“It’s good to get it done really early,” he said.
“You can switch off and just enjoy the summer for what it is, rather than be trying to work out what’s going on and looking at your phone all summer.
“Probably, for the last, I don’t know how many years, 10, 15 years, I’ve probably dealt with one-year contracts. You never know where you’re standing.
“Sometimes you go into the summer, maybe you’ve been offered a contract, but you’ve got 30 days until you can take it and all of them things, and you’re looking at things but this was just a no-brainer.
“It’s nice to have a break, to forget about things for a bit, but I must admit I’ve already got itchy feet!”
