ANDREW JOHNSON AND THE GOODISON REDEMPTION
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

If ever there was a player who renewed his playing career, it’s Andrew Johnson. You would say it was a fairy story but that wouldn’t register well in the viscerally heterosexual Royal Blue half of our beloved city. No question, though, the boy done well so far. If you base it alone on the amount of running he does you have to say he’s earned it in spades. Include his current scoring rate and hero status looms. In fact at the moment put him in sight of goal and he becomes a one man box-barrage. Or at least he was until he pulled a hamstring. According to himself the last time he did this he was out for ten weeks.

Beware, this is football and its playing fortunes. Simple minded straight line logic does not apply and never has, in this or any other sport. In reality all you need to enjoy your footy is your own reasonably honed perspective, a working concept of fairness and a sense of humour. Go beyond that and you will get so far up yourself you will scratch your ear or end up as a manic-depressive. You will deserve it too. Do not expect “fairness” when it comes to good and bad luck. Fairness, being a human concept, involves considered human judgement. Chance makes no such acknowledgement. Which of course is why gambling is a mug’s game run by liars and conmen.

Somewhere along the line Andrew (don’t call me Andy) Johnson – look, the name is HIS request – is going to falter. All players do eventually. It might even come as a result of his current injury. When he does, where will you stand then? Will you talk of “crisis”? Will you say, “I always said he was shite,” or mouth any of the phoney retrospective mantras of a brain dead media? Best not to if you want to keep your humanity, as opposed to the single dimension of, say, the Readers Digest or the local pub King Of The Kids raddled with alcohol, fishwife gossip and an evangelist fervour to ram it down everyone else’s throat. No, a good starting point is to acknowledge that all players and managers are merely human. They are not automatons who can turn things on and off at will, principally because there are an equal number of the opposition trying to stop them doing just that. Football is not performed according to a script, however well-trained the players, nor is it as gladiatorial as most mainstream media and the more loony fans would like to have it. It is a spontaneous game and nothing more.

Take our last match at home against Manchester City. It was a game I shouldn’t have been at since I was nursing the kind of intestinal ugly that told you you moved at the risk of dislodging the bug and its contents. As we all know, the match was a bit like that too. When City undeservedly – yes, I am choosing my words with care – equalised in the last minute I had to sit tight for a couple of minutes or I was in serious danger. It was two points lost because we hadn’t taken our chances, and then Moyesy compounded it by substituting all the players who had put the enemy under siege, and then sent on Davey Weir to “help” defend a corner in the last thirty seconds. All told, the final moment was Casey’s Court meets The Back Entry Diddlers in the middle of a custard pie fight between the Bash Street Kids and The Young Ones. Afterwards, Moyesy appeared for a TV interview and said he was “……disappointed wi’ masel’…… “ while wiping lots of egg off his chin. Had he been in my area of the Lower Gwladys Street at the final whistle he would have beaten a hasty retreat to the nearest Calvinist pulpit to preserve his naivete. Around me, normally sane fans were apoplectic. Me, I just made it home to the warm safety of some intense TLC.

During the game Andrew scored yet another. It was (like his first V Watford) the kind of goal you get when fortune is on your side. But of course his nonstop effort means he makes these things more likely. The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary, an ale house folk lesson one James Beattie seems to have forgotten. So now Andrew’s hamstrung. What now?

The reality is we depend on him an awful lot and there’s no ready replacement. James, as we all know, couldn’t really care less until he gets himself into the right mood, which means ultimately he’s unreliable or a poor pro. Young Victor Anichebe needs to work on his first touch before he can survive at Prem level – he’s got the will, the size and body strength but not yet the skill or awareness to defeat seasoned opponents, though there might be one or two he can steamroller. We await James Vaughan’s recovery to see if he can progress from very youthful promise. Apart from that, that’s it. Unless you count Jimmy Mac, that is. Sadly, with Jimmy Mac you can only believe it when you see it, and so far we haven’t seen it in any consistency worth the name; thus far – and it’s been a looong time now – he leaves the arithmetic unchanged.

All of which means we are on tenterhooks to see how long Andrew Johnson is out of the team. When he returns will he adopt a more tentative approach to avoid aggravating the healed injury? Will he ignore it and go ahead at the same rate and repeat it in short order? From previous career evidence and what we’ve seen so far he seems entirely unlikely to slow down. If his hamstring is susceptible then he runs the risk of pulling it again. Then we are back to square one, striker-wise.

Count me in on Andy DuFresne’s side……………”Hope is a good thing.” That’s Andy, not Andrew, though in this lurid metaphor they might amount to the same thing. (07/10/06)

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