Robins boss Johnson ready for Mourinho ‘war’
LEE JOHNSON laughs at the domestic scene. “I’ve got one of those screens in my house where I can move the players like they do on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football,” he explains. “My missus is sat there watching I’m a Celeb and I’m next to her moving the players about. I can do it with software called Coach Paint. I move the opposition in certain areas, put the lines on the screen, tag them, clip them. It’s crazy, really. I guess it’s an example of the obsession.”
The “obsession” is being a football manager; the manager of Bristol City, a “Premier League club in training” as Johnson constantly calls them, who host one of the very biggest clubs, Manchester United, tonight in the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup at Ashton Gate. And they already have three Premier League scalps – Watford, Stoke City and Crystal Palace – on this cup run.
“Do you find it harder to be the challenger or when you are the champion?” Johnson asks. “I just see, when we play these Premier League teams, we are difficult to play against and if there’s a chink in their armour we will find it because of our relentless nature.”
The 36-year-old is himself relentless, a workaholic, who admits he struggles to achieve a work-life balance, and a mix of “old-school” and very modern, a devotee of technology and how it can be used.
ADORN
For example, he points over my shoulder as we chat to one of the huge video screens that adorn the impressive, 27,000 all-seater stadium that the club’s owner, Steve Lansdown, has transformed at a cost of £45million. “I want one of those big screens at the training ground,” Johnson says. “So we can do live analysis. We can film it and put it up on the screen, which we can move around.”
Then there is the app that Johnson, regarded as one of English football’s brightest young managers, built for the players to use on their smartphones. “They wake up and have to fill it in,” he explains. “We video training with the drones, we have playbooks. It’s just about that information, attention and making sure they are stimulated in everything they do. At first it was a cultural shift. We built the app and some lads would look at it, some wouldn’t. And now they are all on it every day.”
It is, Johnson says, about the “buyin”. “I would say I am quite old-school in my values with the demand on the players,” he explains. “I was probably the last of the old-school era that was built around fitness, running and beating the opponent mentally, physically. Going to depths.
“What they used to do, a little like the army, was to break you down to rebuild you. The difference is that back in the day when I was doing it, I was told to do it. Now you have to get that buy-in. I delivered a presentation at the start of the season and said, ‘Listen lads, my role is to be there for you and to make you are the best you can be and part of that is that I’m going to have to push you, which means you will be the fittest you have ever been and then play the best football you’ve ever played’. It’s about getting the buy-in and a lot of that is based on technology. They can see it; they want to see it.”
And there is more. Johnson spent 12 hours at the A&E department at a local hospital – to see how decisions are made under real life-and-death pressure – and has spoken to the SAS about how they operate. He is learning French, has a “thirst for learning”, eventually wants to manage abroad
I ask him whether it is also true that he measures the length of the grass before every away game. “I want to be open and honest with the media but I don’t want to sound gimmicky,” Johnson says. “Somebody spotted me doing that.” So is it true? “Yeah, it’s not false.”
So why does he do it? “We like our grass at 23mm,” Johnson explains. “But if it’s at 27mm and it’s a Desso pitch [a mix of grass and artificial fibres], it’s a different roll of the ball. Like at Norwich where we put the ball in behind them early and it stuck. And I go back to the era when my dad was assistant manager to John Beck [at Cambridge United] and that was the extreme when they used to put sand in the corners. It’s just about understanding and giving the players the best chance.”
It is the first mention of Johnson’s father, Gary, the manager of League Two Cheltenham Town, who underwent a triple heart-bypass in March. Johnson is also the one to raise the word “nepotism”, given the former midfielder played for his father at Yeovil Town and Bristol City.
NEPOTISM
“I always had to fight the nepotism [accusations],” Johnson says. “I was lucky to have a successful career, I think, for my genetics – I blame my parents for that one – given the fact that I am 5ft 6in and not blessed with unbelievable speed. But it goes back to getting the most out of what I have. I don’t know, I just think that I always had to prove something.”
It leads to him working so hard. “We won’t be outworked,” he says of Bristol City, who are third in the Championship with four straight wins after flirting with relegation last season when Johnson felt compelled to move home because of some of the abuse he received. “I remember as a player there was an era where people used to call it ‘busy’ – ‘don’t be busy’, they said. And I used to think, ‘I can’t believe that culture is allowed in football’. Because there I am doing my extra, trying to get everything out of myself and I am getting called ‘busy’. So that is something that is banned here.”
Facing United, and Jose Mourinho, is a bonus and Johnson will pick the brains of the United manager, just as he has done with the likes of Brendan Rodgers and Kenny Dalglish throughout his career.
There is no chance Johnson will be overawed by tonight’s meeting. “Trust me, it’s war, it’s a war in that technical area,” he says. “You have to make sure that everyone knows you are there and to be taken seriously. I think that’s probably the side of me that people who don’t know me don’t realise that I am nasty as well to get a win.
“I don’t know if that’s a strength or weakness but, as a player, I would do anything to get an extra yard or the extra mental edge, whether that be in the tunnel or outside the tunnel, and I am no different now. We are certainly up for it.” (© Daily Telegraph, London)