LOCKED IN A CELL PHONE

Bristol City boss Lee: Modern players don’t speak to each other, they’re always on their mobiles..so I put them in a ’prison’

Bristol City Nott’m Forest Kick-off 3pm BEFORE Bristol City’s latest bid to escape the Championship, Lee Johnson had all his squad trying to get out of a locked room.

The team-building exercise was all about freeing the tech prisoners from their iPhones. And getting his young players to realise it is good to talk. “When I played, it was a different era,” said the former midfielder, who is only 37. “You have these millennials now and they don’t speak to each other. “It is unbelievable. We come back from training and I walk into the dressing room and every single player has got their phone out. “And I say, ‘What could have happened in the last hourand-a-half we have been out training that you have to go through Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter?’ “Instead of having a bit of banter and playing practical jokes. The big problem is having enough communicators when we are under the cosh because we have young players who are not naturally great at it.

“And we have lost leads here too many times. We have to put some kind of communication into every other session. The other day we took everybody to Locked In A Room in the city.

“It was good fun – you can hear all the other lads cheering because they have got past a particular code or lock to get to the next stage. I think some of them are still in there!”

Johnson, who could talk for his whole team, saw his City team beat four Premier League sides – including Manchester United – to reach the Carabao Cup semi-finals. But a superb start to the season fell away in the New Year and the Robins finished 11th.

Asked what he learned, Johnson joked: “Don’t have a cup run and don’t get lots of injuries!”

But chatting before their season opener against Nottingham Forest, he insisted: “The cup run was great. It had its negatives.

Sometimes players can get delusions of grandeur. We were very humble in the first half of the season.

“Our profiles all shot up. That coincided with a lot of games and a lot of injuries. You put all that in a bubbling cauldron and what spits out is not conducive to winning games.”