No. While it might sometimes be possible for a worker to listen to the bitcoin network and terate through all the transactions they know about and generate a merkle root for each iteration until they find a matching merkle root if they wanted to. They won't reliably always have heard the necessary transactions, and won't typically be able to find a matching merkle root in a reasonable amount of time.
He can (the original, classic way), but he doesn't necessarily need to (modern full nodes).
The hashMerkleRoot is not enough.