By David Williams

Sean Morrison aims to help Cardiff City force a submission from Leeds United today – just as the Hulk Hogan fan did at Elland Road back in December.

It may not be the wrestling ring – and there will certainly be no live audience – but there will still be a strong sense of theatre when the two clubs go head-to-head in a noon showdown.

Back before lockdown, the Championship rivals met six months ago when Morrison inspired a Cardiff comeback from 3-0 down to snatch a 3-3 draw and got sent off – all the while sporting a dyed blond moustache and with a Hulk Hogan costume on his dressing room peg.

“It was a mad last 10 or 15 minutes,” recalls Morrison, who paraded his handlebar mo, red bandana and knee-high yellow wrestling boots later that night at a Christmas fancy dress party.

“I remember walking in at half-time – I had a blond moustache at the time as I was dressed as Hulk Hogan for a fancy dress party, so I was getting plenty of abuse.

“We were getting hammered and at Elland Road it’s such a hostile place to go for any away team. It’s a tough, tough place to go and when you’re losing 3-0 the noise in there means you can barely hear the person 10 yards away from you.

“When I scored the second goal, the crowd went quiet. I can remember thinking, ‘we’ve got a chance to nick something hear’. “Two minutes later I walking down the tunnel after getting a red card!

“But then Lee Tomlin produced a little bit of magic to put Robert Glatzel through for the goal. Rob sticks it away and we came away with a point.

“It was a brilliant away day. Those are the ones you remember at the end of the season, when you have had to really fight for it.

“The fancy dress party was fantastic, too, and I was the best dressed as always. It took me two months to grow that moustache and I was walking around with it dyed blond for a week!”

With no football and no parties for the past three months, Morrison says he has stayed sane through time spent walking his young Doberman, Pepper.

“She’s very noisy and likes to whine a lot, but she would take you out walking for five hours a day if you wanted and getting her was one of the best things we’ve ever done.”

In the past few weeks, dog-walking has been interspersed with a return to training and watching the return of live football in the Bundesliga.

Morrison adds: “In Germany, in the first few games, you could see that 20 per cent of teams at home were winning, which is quite a low stat.

“It will definitely make a difference, especially for the team who rely on a lot of home fans for atmosphere.

“It will make it a level playing field for a lot of teams. We are not really sure of how it will feel until we get out there.

“We know we have a job to do. We want to get into the play-offs and Leeds want automatic promotion. It’s going to be a feisty game with a lot of passion and desire.

“Watching the Bundesliga games and the ones in the Premier League, you can see that certain players have a different more relaxed feel about their game.

“They haven’t got 20,000 pairs of eyes looking at them, keen for mistakes. Some players have definitely been more relaxed and have made more mistakes.

“That’s something as a back four that we need to be careful of. We need to remember this is a very important league game. It’s not a training game where you can take chances.

“If you’ve got to kick it into Row Z, even if there’s no-one there, you’ve got to do it.

“There’s no point in taking risks and losing games. These are nine cup finals. We want to knuckle down and win them all.”