Johnson: Now for the other Manchester half
BANTER: MY DAD SAID HE WAS THE BEST; I’VE PUSHED HIM
Stoppage-time strike meant there was no way back.
After fashioning the sensation of the English football season with a League Cup triumph over Manchester United, Bristol City manager Lee Johnson knows there could only be one way to top a win over Jose Mourinho – and that is by beating Pep Guardiola.
The cheering was still reverberating at the Ashton Gate home of the second-tier Championship club on Wednesday after their last-gasp 2-1 quarterfinal win over the Premier League giants when the semifinal draw offered them an even giddier follow-up.
For the Robins’ reward on one of the finest nights in their 123year history was to set up the prospect of another when Guardiola’s Manchester City, the team of the moment, visit them in a lastfour, second-leg tie in January.
Johnson was asked how it felt to be presented with the hardest task in English football against a side unbeaten in domestic matches this term. “It’s brilliant,” he enthused. “We move on now. We didn’t show United too much respect. Now it’s on to Manchester City over two legs,” he said. “City are a beast of an organisation.”
The exultant scenes that greeted Korey Smith’s 93rd-minute winner would, reckoned Johnson, “live in the memory of this football club for many years”.
His father Gary was one of City’s more successful managers when Lee was a player at the club. “But I think tonight was the greatest moment in both of our tenures,” reckoned Johnson.
“My dad always says he was the most successful Bristol City manager so maybe I’ve pushed him a little bit close with that result.”
None more so than Joe Bryan, a Bristolian and product of their academy, whose wonderful second-half strike had put City ahead before Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s equalising free-kick looked likely to inspire a United comeback win.
Still, City kept believing and were rewarded by Smith’s superbly taken left-foot winner on the turn in the final seconds.
Mourinho, while praising City for playing “the game of their lives”, could not quite bring himself to offer unqualified admiration as he kept suggesting the home side were “lucky” to survive with Ibrahimovic and Marcus Rashford hitting the woodwork.
Yet he understood this was City’s night, “a beautiful night for football”. –