Bradley Johnson ⭑ From A-Z since '92
By the time he got into the Championship with Leeds United, Bradley Johnson had learned how to win an argument — and win over the doubters. Ken Bates was making a mistake by trying to turn the fans against someone who would just turn them right back again.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
Bradley Johnson was a player you could see was learning in front of you in real time, which could make him either frustrating or endearing, depending on your point of view. Gary McAllister didn't have much patience with him, and when Johnson's mind wandered and the ball rolled under his foot and out of play, you could understand why the stylish midfielder turned manager was anxious for Fabian Delph to grow up and play instead. But Johnson was growing up too, and was going to play in the Premier League, and he was going to get there long before Leeds United.
The whole McAllister thing was a bit of an accident anyway, as Johnson had been brought to Leeds by Dennis Wise, who played him in one game then quit to work at Newcastle instead. The new midfielder had to start again under a new manager, but even at just twenty years old, Johnson was already used to starting over. He'd been in the youth sides at Arsenal — a contemporary of Neil Kilkenny, who signed for Leeds and Wise the same week — but was let go, aged fifteen, for being too small. The diminutive stature that had made Johnson the perfect performer for a motorcycle display team between the ages of five and nine was now counting against him. The bikes had taken him to Canada, to Singapore, to the Edinburgh tattoo, Johnson told podcast On The Judy (as in, Judi Dench = bench), "which is crazy now. I've got kids myself now, and I think I would never, ever send my five-year-old to go on a Saturday and go on motorbikes."
Growing up in East London, moving from motorbikes to Arsenal had been a good way of keeping out of trouble, but fifteen was a bad age to be let go. Without ever getting seriously involved in the gang lifestyles tempting others around him, Johnson still found danger by venturing into the wrong estate, and finding someone there who knew he played football and who stabbed him in the legs for it. He needed a plan, and was given a chance of returning to football at Waltham Forest: get fit, come training, and if he proved he was serious, he'd get games. From there, it was a case of taking every opportunity to show what he could do, in environments that, step-by-step, felt stranger and stranger. "Cambridge," he told On The Judy, "it is quiet, posh, all nice. And there wasn't one kid from London, no one I could relate to." At one point, word got out among the youth players he was rooming with that he'd once been stabbed. "It's like, so what's it like growing up in your estate? Have you held a gun? Is there shootings? Is there stabbings every day? And I was like (sighing) no ... And the banter in football, I didn't get that when I was seventeen." Jokes about people's mums were a big no to young Bradley. "In school, if anyone spoke about your mum, we're fighting," he said. "I had to buy into the way they do it rather than where I'd been growing up."
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If anything, his confusion helped him. A fortnight long argument about whether he'd do an initiation song — he'd thought he was being picked on, until he was eventually told everyone had done it — showed the coaches that he was going to stand up for himself, self-possession that also impressed players as he moved into first team training and moved to Northampton. It was Johnson's desire to make a loan to Stevenage permanent that convinced new Northampton manager Stuart Gray to take his own look at him, and after one match, to keep playing him every week. Until, after interest from Championship clubs, Dennis Wise took him for a look at Leeds.
"If you drive into Leeds training ground and see, just the history of Leeds, a club like Leeds being interested in you — I didn't even think about the fifteen point deduction or being in League One when I went up there and saw the training ground and the stadium." Dennis Wise was a big draw too, a fellow Londoner and a big name in football convincing him to come north. But Wise was soon gone, and with him, the last vestiges of United's good form. After Johnson's debut ended with a 1-0 win at Crewe, seven games went by before he was on the winning side again. After that there were only two defeats at Leeds, and a final points tally that with fifteen added back would have meant automatic promotion; Leeds went into the play-offs where, with Alan Sheehan suspended, McAllister asked Johnson to move to left-back. He did well enough in the semi-finals to keep his place for the final against Doncaster, when nobody on the Leeds side did well at anything.
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Wise and McAllister's stockpiling of midfielders had already pushed Johnson to left-wing before he was tried at left-back, and 2008/09 became his housemate Fabian Delph's breakout season. With seven players competing to get into central midfield, Johnson wasn't content to sit around. "My dad always said — go out and play. I knew clubs were interested in me. Gary McAllister said I'm not going to play, Fabian's got my shirt, so I said, I want to go out on loan." By scoring five in ten games from central midfield for Brighton, Johnson made his point, and on 3rd January 2009 he was telling the local press that, if things didn't work out at Leeds, he'd told manager Mickey Adams that he'd be happy to come back.