GARY JOHNSON
MATT BADCOCK, OF OUR SISTER PUBLICATION THE NON-LEAGUE PAPER, CATCHES UP WITH TORQUAY UNITED’S VASTLY EXPERIENCED MANAGER…
Torquay manager’s tales
DON’T TALK to Gary Johnson about Alexa. The smart voice-activated technology doesn’t always give the answers you want to hear. As the Torquay United manager found out.
“Even if you blinking ask Alexa ‘Who is Gary Johnson?’, she says ‘Gary Johnson is the father of Lee Johnson!’” he says. “That’s unbelievable, isn’t it? I was gutted. I had my little granddaughter Isabella with me ‘n all. She went, ‘Yeah!’”
Johnson is joking, of course, about son Lee Johnson’s burgeoning management career that sees Bristol City pushing for the Championship play-offs and a place in the Premier League.
Johnson says Lee’s move into management with Oldham Athletic as a 31-yearold came as shock – dad wasn’t even told he’d applied in the first place – which has subsequently taken him to Barnsley and now City in a rapid rise.
Johnson’s careful to only give advice when asked but when there’s more than 30 years of experience and five promotions as a sole manager, there haven’t been many better to learn from.
No doubt a lot came from hours in the car together when he played for his dad at Yeovil and Bristol City.
“And in dressing rooms,” Johnson says. “Lee used to say, when I was manager at Cambridge, he used to sneak into the kit baskets in the dressing room so he could hear the team talks. That’s what he said – he did well to hide it all these years!”
Johnson is clearly proud of how Lee has taken to life in the dug-out.
“Lee has been very successful,” John- son says. “He’s never got sacked, he’s always moved up – he’s been worth more as a manager than he was as a player!
“I swear it was a shock when he first went into it. He rang me up and said, ‘Dad, I think I’ve got the Oldham job’. I said, ‘What are you on about got the Oldham job?’ He said, ‘I didn’t say anything to you, but I went for an interview and it went well’.
“I said, ‘Well, look, they will have interviewed ten to 15 people, Lee, so don’t get excited’. He was 31 and he got the job. I’d obviously known he was building up and he’d done all his coaching courses, but often you’re a third coach at a Second Division team or you take a Non-League team. But he took Oldham, then went to Barnsley and now Bristol and, of course, he’s doing very well.
“He’s his own man, Lee. You give him the advice if he asks for it. That’s very rare because he likes to do it himself. But if you want to give him advice when he’s not asking, he’s not happy!
“We respect each other for what we’re doing. You respect the whole
thing because there’s a lot of work you have to do.”
Johnson himself went into management in 1986 with Newmarket Town before becoming John Beck’s assistant at Cambridge United as the pair took the U’s up the leagues to the brink of the Premier League.
He later had two promotions under Graham Taylor at Watford, spent time in charge of Latvia’s national side and then returned to England to take over at Yeovil Town.
‘Gary Who?’ he remembers was the headline on the local paper. It didn’t take the Glovers long to find out as he took them to FA Trophy glory in his first season and then led a swashbuckling side to the Conference title by 17 points a year later.
Promotion to Division Two was secured after two seasons in the Football League before another followed at Bristol City, this time the League One title – a club he took to the Championship play-off final only to be defeated by Hull City.
Spells at Peterborough United and Northampton Town, who he kept in the Football League, followed before a Yeovil return where, in 2013, another promotion came through the play-offs as the southwest club reached the unlikely heights of the Championship.
Add in a National League title with Cheltenham Town – taking the club back to League Two at the first attempt – and it’s not hard to see why Torquay United were so glad to get his services earlier this season.
A faltering Gulls side are now top of the National League South and going all guns blazing for the championship.
Adorned on the walls of the communal room we sit in for a chat at Torquay’s South Devon College training hub are pictures of players Harry Kane and Raheem Sterling along with inspirational quotes.
Wherever he’s been, it’s been generally the same theory behind success – Plan it, Build it, Achieve it.
“I knew very early on in management I had to get a group I could get on with,” Johnson says. “Otherwise you come in and you walk past somebody because you don’t want to talk to them and that messes you up. So, very quickly, you’ve got to get a group that you know you respect them, and they respect you. I learnt that pretty quick and then it’s experience.
“People can get bogged down in tactics. Sometimes you’ve got to let the lads game-manage and, therefore, you’ve got to get the ones that think about the game, watch the game on the telly, concentrate on the video tactics – and not just your review but your preview of the opposition. All those things, you have to get right.
“My little granddaughter, she’s ten and she’s just got into the school she wanted to get into. She really, really had to work hard to pass the exams. And she got in yesterday. It made me think, ‘How many hours did she spend with her mum and dad, her nan and grandad, her great grandmother?’ We all played a little bit of a part in her putting in enough concentration as a young student to get the chance of the school she wanted.
“That’s the same with players. You get your rewards, I think, at the end of that. But if I hadn’t had any promotions, it would all be talk.
“We can all say the things I’ve just said – some people get jobs on the strength of just talking – but I was at Cambridge with three promotions as an assistant to John Beck, I was at Watford with promotion to the First Division and the Premiership with Graham Taylor.
“So, other than my five, I know what people you need to bring on your bus,