Nathan Moriah-Welsh exclusive: Hibs, Guyana and making it the hard way

“Getting released three times, people would probably pack it in after the first or second, never mind the third,” says the 22-year-old from West London. “But I was always like: ‘fair enough, just get on with it’.”

His tales of a footballing childhood punctuated by rejection after rejection may just resonate with more people outside the professional game than in it. There are, after all, far fewer who push through the punches when that dream of ‘making it’ weighs so heavy it becomes an unbearable burden. Most end up on the scrap heap, either through reluctant choice or with one ‘thanks, but no thanks’ too many. Moriah-Welsh, however, chose to persevere.

“It was always football for me,” the Hibs midfielder says. “I started getting scouted quite young, probably seven or eight, and signed for Chelsea when I was nine. I got released and went to Brentford, got released and went to Reading, then got released again.

“Football was fun up until about 14. I ended up getting some little demons, in a way, and I stopped enjoying it. It’s the other side of football that people don’t see – I wasn’t playing and I felt there was a bit of favouritism at certain clubs. There was school as well, stuff that kids go through. It wasn’t a bad time, a lot of kids go through it – some don’t talk about it, some do.

“Getting released did build up resilience for me, which is a good thing in the long term. At the time, it wasn’t great, but now I wouldn’t change it for the world. The one from Reading was probably the worst because that was round about scholarship age. My grandad, especially, was like: ‘I think you need to stop football now and focus on school’.”

I ask if he considered it.

“Nah, no chance,” comes the instant reply, with a wry smile that suggests, ‘Be serious, mate’. His grandad may have felt it was time to put the ball away and hit the books, but no such thoughts were flooding Moriah-Welsh’s teenaged head. It would have been simpler for his parents to side with the family’s elder statesman, of course, as there’s surely a fine line between supporting your son’s dream and pushing him on to nothing but further disappointment. Perhaps the understated confidence he’s exuding across the table in a side room at HTC was evident to mum and dad back then, too. It’s easy for footballers to say, ‘I always knew I would make it’ when they actually have done, but with Moriah-Welsh, I don’t doubt his unwavering certainty for a second.

Still though; getting to this point was anything but straightforward. After being let go by Reading, he sought solace with his old Sunday League team, reconnecting with friends and remembering why he started playing the game in the first place.

“It was to find the love for it again,” says Moriah-Welsh. “That year, I wasn’t really enjoying football, so I just went back and played for my old club, and I did love it.”

His mum, meanwhile, was busy flooding the inboxes of clubs the length and breadth of England, stating her son’s case for a trial – ‘she must have emailed about 20 or 30 teams’ - with Brighton and Bournemouth the quickest to respond. Although the former felt glamorous, the Cherries’ offer was ‘more concrete’. Choosing Bournemouth in the summer of 2018 was one of two decisions Moriah-Welsh describes as among the best he’s ever made. The second would come later, but for the first time in years, he felt as though he’d found a footballing home.

“I’ll never have a bad word to say about Bournemouth,” he states, citing a particular appreciation of then under-18s managers Alan Connell, who took a chance on a kid many others had dismissed. In January 2021, on the day of his 19th birthday, Moriah-Welsh made the Cherries first team as a substitute for an FA Cup defeat by Southampton, and a month later made his international debut with Guyana - the second of those two decisions he’ll forever cherish. Surely it must have felt like a prolonged moment of vindication for those preceding years of struggle?

“Yeah, definitely,” Moriah-Welsh answers. “I trained on and off with the first team since I was 16, but that was the start of my transition into men’s football.”

After one senior appearance – an FA Cup win over Yeovil Town in which a certain Emiliano Marcondes scored a hat-trick - that transition was to continue just north of Cardiff from August 2022. Moriah-Welsh agreed a year’s loan spell at Newport County - a struggling League Two outfit fighting to stay in the English Football League, yet the ideal rite of passage for a youngster stepping out of the academy bubble for the first time to take some formative bumps and bruises. He seems, even back then, to have been acutely aware that youth systems higher up the pyramid can be a somewhat sheltered environment - there are not, as far as I know, any 30-something hatchet men raking their studs down your heels in development games. A full 46 appearances for Newport suggests Moriah-Welsh was not caught off-guard by life in the lower leagues. It served as both an ‘eye-opener’ and motivation to push as high as possible, away from a corner of the football world where relegation is not just a blot on the CV, but potentially the beginning of the end of a professional career. It was also a crash course in football’s much-revered – and sometimes vague - ‘dark arts’, plus a valuable lesson that sometimes you just need to launch the ball up the park.

“I loved it there; the players, fans, staff, the club in general, just beautiful people,” says Moriah-Welsh. “I played 46 games, a good chunk of football, and I learned the dark side of the game there that you don’t get as an academy player. That’s what I needed at the time. Academy football is ‘pass, pass, pass’. Going down to League Two we did pass the ball, but there are times you have to go long and do the dirty side.

“People’s lives are on the line, you know what I mean? Mortgages, and stuff like that. Lads are fighting for their lives in League Two, and at one point we were facing relegation, people are scrapping and thinking ‘f**k, what are we going to do next year if we go down?’ It was a real eye-opener. We had a good January and February, and we survived. But it was really good for me to see that side of things.

“Probably every League Two player would say, ‘If I could go back in time, I would work harder’. I wanted to work as hard as possible in order to - with respect to the league - not end up there. I want to play as high as possible and I need to work as hard as I can to do that.”

Having graduated from boy to man, the realisation soon crept up on Moriah-Welsh that his new-found taste for senior football could no longer be satiated at Bournemouth. Some may have been reluctant to part ways with a club that had given them so much, but he knew it was the right call.

“It was definitely time to leave,” he says, assuredly. “I had injured my knee last summer and got put back down to the under-23s at Bournemouth. I just felt it was time to go and make my way. Last summer, my international manager said: ‘You can go on loan as many times as you like, but when people make these moves they’re never afraid to lose’. From then, I felt I needed a permanent move and a fresh start, and I can’t think of a better club than Hibs. I’ve had a good start, but not as good as I would have liked.”

At his first Hibs press conference, Moriah-Welsh described himself as a ‘perfectionist’, something reflected in his tendency not to be overly complimentary about himself. He has impressed during a difficult period; his aggressiveness and mobility offering a different profile in Nick Montgomery’s midfield. His signing was announced on the morning of Hibs’ 2-2 draw with Kilmarnock on January 27, and he was whisked straight to Ayrshire for a seat on the bench that afternoon. His debut arrived a week later in, shall we say, sub-optimal circumstances – thrown on at half-time while 3-0 down to St Mirren on a day when Hibs were booed off the pitch at the interval, and booed back onto it. Moriah-Welsh, though, did himself no harm in that second period.

“I got called inside and I remember thinking, 'You know what, we could always come back and I could be the hero, or I can just make as strong an impression as I can for the next game'," he says. “Luckily I did that because I started the next game. But I just wanted to go and give the fans belief, give the lads belief. I’ve absolutely loved it so far, it’s everything I could have asked for.”

It's admittedly been a little stop-start since then, with Montgomery rotating players and Moriah-Welsh picking up a suspension for a straight red card against Rangers in the Scottish Cup. He’s only been around for the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, but there seems to be an understanding of the expectation that comes with wearing a Hibs jersey, and the depth of fan frustration that followed the team’s failure to make the top six after another frustrating afternoon, this time at Motherwell.

“I didn’t see the goal at Motherwell,” he says, with a grimace. “I came off when we were 1-0 up.  When that throw-in came in, I looked away because I just felt, ‘I can’t watch this anymore’. Then obviously, I saw the Motherwell fans celebrating, and it was a feeling of everything just being taken out of you.

“As a team, we have to take responsibility. All we can really do is apologise to the fans. It’s in the past now and we’ve got four games to build momentum for next season and for exciting times to come. It was obviously a negative, but we need to build positives for the future.

"The late goals we've conceded... it’s a tough one. We could look at each other individually and say, 'Why weren’t you there, why weren’t you in this position?’ but in football, things don’t always go your way, and it’s probably gone against more than for us.

“But at a certain point, you can’t just put it down to coincidence. Maybe there is something we’re not doing, but we are working hard every day to rectify each thing. The lads have dug in the last two weeks and worked extremely hard for these last games.

It’s also hurt Moriah-Welsh to see Montgomery – the man who brought him into an environment he’s relishing so much - take the brunt of the flak for collective shortcomings.

“Everyone looks at the gaffer, but the gaffer isn’t on the pitch,” he insists. “He’s giving us instructions and at times, we’re not executing that to the best of our ability. It’s not all up to the gaffer, we have to take some responsibility – which we have done and will continue to do.

“But the gaffer’s been top with how we’ve reacted to those games [before the split], we’ve got to repay him for the faith he’s put in us, especially for me, because he’s brought in me and a few other lads, so I’ve got to help get the team going.”

There are flickers of leadership potential in Moriah-Welsh, despite his youth. He’s already worn the skipper's armband for Guyana, although in what I’m quickly gathering is typically understated fashion, he plays it down with a shrug.

“Yeah, I was captain for like half an hour and we got beat 6-0, so…”

That aside, there’s nothing blasé about the way Moriah-Welsh speaks about what his international career means to him. He was courted by Guyana, thanks to his mum, and Grenada, through his dad, but opted for the former, following a conversation with their head scout. His international away days thus far read like someone’s overly ambitious travel bucket list: the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, and St Kitt’s and Nevis to name a few.

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“My grandparents were born in Guyana,” he explains. “My mum was the first generation to move to England, so it’s pretty much through my grandparents that I made the decision. It was either Grenada or Guyana, but I chose Guyana in the end. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve made. I was eligible to play for the Republic of Ireland as well, but nothing ever happened there. Guyana’s been a great experience: the countries I’ve seen, the football I’ve played.

“It’s very unique compared to some of the lads who have played for Scotland or England. It’s very different. The football’s not as glamorous but it’s a deeper thing, going away and seeing the passion in some of the countries - especially when you play in the Latin countries; their passion for football is next to none.

“It’s an honour and privilege to go home to where your parents and grandparents are from, and just play.  My first call-up was away to the Dominican Republic, which was top. There’s never really rain there; it’s just hot, all the time! We’ve had a good run in the last year; we’re unbeaten in about a year and six months. We’ve got World Cup qualifiers coming up, it’s an exciting time.”

I ask Moriah-Welsh what makes it the ‘deeper thing’ he alluded to.

“It feels like going to war with your brothers,” he answers. “Standing for the national anthem, things like that. The deepest one I felt was in Puerto Rico in October, and we needed to win both games. We went 1-0 down in both but came back to win 3-1 each time to get into League A in the Nations League. It’s just a deeper meaning, going to play against other nations when everyone’s connected through blood. We’re not actually a family, but in a way, we are.

“There’s a lot of lads from the UK, and we all travel together to meet up with the squad. And even though they’re on the other side of the world, we stay in contact with the local lads. It’s a brotherhood. It’s a long shot, but we’ve got a good chance at the 2026 World Cup. Canada, USA and Mexico have already qualified and they’re the biggest three countries in our region. There’s another three spots available… you can only dream, can’t you?”

It’s certainly got him this far, so who knows?