Speaking to the Daily Mail today, Glen Johnson spoke of his admiration for current manager Brendan Rodgers and his methods since joining Liverpool FC.
Taking the line that Rodgers deals better on a one-to-one basis with his players than former manager, Jose Mourinho, Johnson said “He’s (Rodgers) shown that if you’re good enough you’re old enough and you’ll play in the big games if you deserve to. So, in terms of man-management, Brendan is definitely better.”
“It was difficult for me under Jose at Chelsea because there was a moment when he said I deserved to play on merit,”
“He said if I played well in the next game I would play the week after. I got man of the match so he couldn’t drop me.”
Johnson continued, “Then in the next game he said the same thing and I got man of the match again. Then we had another game and after that Barcelona. I remember speaking to my agent and saying, ‘He won’t play me in this game because if I play well then he has to play me against Barcelona’, and I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”
For the short period Johnson was at Chelsea during Mourinho’s first stint as manager, the full-back was not particularly treated badly, just not manager’s first choice. And while he may feel somehow slighted by his treatment at the hands of Jose it was, in a way, the making of him as he went on to great success at Portsmouth and then Liverpool.
Given the defender’s form this season for Liverpool though, the availability of another half-decent right-back (or if Enrique had been fit), Johnson may well have found himself spending a lot more time on the bench!
In typically predictable fashion though, the press took the ‘man-management’ out of Johnson’s comments to create a more suitable ‘I prefer Rodgers to Mourinho’ line, in order to stoke a bit of animosity prior to the final 10 games of the season.
On the face of it, Johnson’s comments are nothing more than a player stating his preference for his current manage over a previous manager that chose to sell him so there is really little of note in the full-backs’ comments.
However, Mourinho loves nothing more than to get involved in mind games and while, so far, he’s more or less left Liverpool to their own devices, with Johnson’s words (and Chelsea’s visit to Anfield on the horizon) you can practically guarantee that the Chelsea coach’s fires have been well and truly stoked.
