George Johnston, born 21 March 1947, Glasgow, Scotland.
PART ONE
A Glaswegian by birth, George Johnston´s first organised experience came with Maryhill Harp, one of the junior sides that gave local boys a chance to sharpen their ability against opponents who were often older, stronger and not inclined to offer favours. Johnston was used chiefly as a centre-forward, but he was mobile enough to operate across the front line, and that combination of movement and an eye for goal brought him to the attention of Cardiff City, who took him away from Scotland and placed him in their youth system.
It was a considerable move for a teenager, yet Johnston settled sufficiently well to be offered professional terms in May 1964, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, and Ninian Park became the ground at which he changed from an eager young recruit into a first-team footballer. Cardiff were then in the Second Division under Jimmy Scoular, a hard and demanding manager who knew what top-class football required, while the senior dressing room contained players of experience and authority, so Johnston was entering an environment in which standards were made clear very quickly and reputations counted for little unless performances followed.
His first months as a professional were spent learning his work away from the main stage, training with seasoned players and trying to show that his youth should not prevent him from being considered, but by February 1965 Scoular believed the forward was ready and handed him his senior debut before Johnston had reached his eighteenth birthday. Cardiff’s league season offered few reasons for celebration, with the side finishing in the lower half of the Second Division, yet the Welsh Cup gave them another route towards a trophy and Johnston became an important part of their progress. Wrexham stood between Cardiff and the cup in a final that required three matches, and the opening leg at Ninian Park on 12 April 1965 provided the clearest early indication of Johnston’s nerve in senior company. Cardiff won 5–1 and the teenager scored twice, his goals giving the home side a commanding advantage and putting him alongside established names rather than merely among the promising youngsters waiting behind them.
Wrexham responded with a 1–0 victory in the return match at the Racecourse Ground, which meant a play-off was required under the competition’s regulations, and the deciding game took place at Shrewsbury Town’s Gay Meadow on 5 May. Johnston again started, this time on the right of a forward line containing Ivor Allchurch, John Charles, Peter King and Bernard Lewis, and Cardiff completed the job with a 3–0 win as Allchurch scored twice and Ray Mielczarek put through his own goal. Johnston had therefore won a senior honour within months of making his debut, but the greater value of that spring was the proof that he could score in an important match and retain his place when the pressure increased.
That introduction led directly into the season in which Johnston became a regular, because during 1965–66 he was no longer being used simply as a young player of promise but as a forward expected to carry a share of Cardiff’s scoring burden. He did so impressively, finishing with seventeen goals from thirty-six Second Division appearances and twenty-three in all competitions, figures that made him the club’s leading scorer even though he was playing in an attack that included the great John Charles and the emerging John Toshack. Charles was nearing the end of his playing days but remained an imposing figure, clever in his use of the ball and immensely difficult to handle in the air, while Toshack was only a year older than Johnston and beginning to show the qualities that would later take him to Liverpool and Wales.
Playing alongside those two players could have pushed a less confident youngster into the background, but Johnston found room for his own contribution, moving across the attacking positions, reacting quickly around the eighteen-yard area and proving that he could score often enough to justify his selection. Cardiff’s league form remained a struggle and they finished twentieth, only four points above relegated Middlesbrough, but their cup performances were much stronger and Johnston played a full part in a season that carried them into the League Cup semi-finals for the first time.
The Bluebirds defeated Newport County, Ipswich Town, Leicester City and Peterborough United before meeting West Ham United over two legs, and although the East London side ended the run, Cardiff had shown that their young attack could trouble opponents from a higher division. European football also arrived through the previous season’s Welsh Cup success, with Johnston scoring as Cardiff overcame Standard Liège by 2–1 at Ninian Park in the European Cup Winners’ Cup, though a heavy 5–1 defeat in Belgium brought a sharp end to that adventure. The season was uneven for the team, but it was a breakthrough for Johnston, who had gone from teenage newcomer to leading marksman in little more than a year.
Cardiff began 1966–67 with Johnston established and with outside clubs increasingly aware of him, yet the match that eventually shaped his future did not come in the league or one of the recognised cup competitions. The Aberfan disaster of 21 October 1966, when a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto the Welsh village and killed 144 people, including 116 children, brought grief that reached far beyond football, and clubs arranged fundraising matches to assist the disaster fund. Cardiff met Arsenal at Ninian Park in one of those benefit fixtures, and Johnston scored twice against the First Division side, producing the sort of display that forced the visiting club to look at him more closely. It was not simply that he had found the back of the goal, because Arsenal’s staff could see a young attacker who moved intelligently, showed confidence against senior defenders and appeared capable of adapting to a faster level.
PART TWO
Bertie Mee had taken charge at Highbury in the summer of 1966 and was attempting to reshape a side that had finished in the bottom half of the First Division table, while his coaching staff included men who placed great value on discipline, physical preparation and careful organisation. Arsenal watched George Johnston again after the benefit match and made their move in March 1967, paying Cardiff £20,000 for a forward who had scored twenty-one league goals in sixty appearances and twenty-six in seventy-four senior games across all competitions. The transfer represented a considerable step, for Johnston was leaving a side near the foot of the Second Division and joining one of the country’s largest clubs, but it was also an endorsement of what he had done since making his debut at seventeen. He was not bought as an established star and the Gunners could offer no guarantee of a regular place, yet at twenty he had earned an opportunity in the First Division and the move looked like the natural reward for his speed of progress.
He arrived too late to play a major part in the closing weeks of 1966–67, so his proper beginning at Arsenal arrived on 19 August 1967, when Mee selected him for the opening league match against Stoke City at Highbury. Arsenal won the game 1–0 through a goal from George Graham, and even though Johnston did not score, he had made his First Division debut in front of a crowd of more than thirty-five thousand spectators, leading the attack against defenders of a standard he had not previously encountered every week. The difference between being Cardiff’s leading scorer and competing for a position at Arsenal soon became apparent, because Mee had John Radford as his principal centre-forward, while Graham, Jon Sammels, David Jenkins and Colin Addison were among the other attacking choices available during the first half of the season.
Johnston nevertheless received a proper run in the side, and he scored his first Arsenal goal in a 1–1 draw to Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough in September, a useful response after the team had endured a difficult start away from home. His second league goal came during a 2–1 win over Nottingham Forest at Highbury in October, while a third followed in a 3–2 loss by Sheffield United in December, and those strikes showed that he could make an impact at the higher level even if he was not yet scoring with the regularity he had managed at Cardiff. He was quick, fair-haired and direct, and Arsenal used him through the middle or from the right, but his place was never entirely secure because the side were still searching for the right balance. Mee wanted more goals from his forwards and was prepared to alter his selection, so his first season became a test of patience as well as ability, with promising appearances followed by periods in which he had to wait for another chance.
The League Cup gave Arsenal their strongest run of 1967–68 and offered Johnston some of his most important football for the club, although the route to Wembley was anything but straightforward. After overcoming Reading, Bristol Rovers and Blackburn Rovers, Arsenal met Burnley in a quarter-final that turned into a fierce argument spread over two matches, with the first game at Highbury ending 3–3 after the North Londoners recovered from two goals down. George Graham scored twice and Frank McLintock added the other, but Bob McNab was sent off after the interval and Burnley forced a replay, while a league meeting between the clubs three days later ended in a 1–0 Arsenal defeat in which Mee’s side finished with nine men. Pat Rice came into the team for the League Cup replay at Turf Moor, Arsenal survived another difficult contest and Johnston remained involved as their opportunity grew.
Huddersfield Town were the semi-final opponents and Arsenal won 3–2 at Highbury before producing a stronger performance in the return at Leeds Road, where a 3–1 victory carried them through 6–3 on aggregate and sent the club to Wembley for the first time since the 1952 FA Cup final. Johnston had contributed during the run, but by then his position was under pressure and the arrival of Bobby Gould from Coventry City for £90,000 in February made the competition sharper still. Gould was a forceful centre-forward bought to supply the aggression and finishing Mee felt his team lacked, while Radford remained ahead of Johnston in the reckoning, and the young Scot was consequently omitted from the side for the final against Leeds United on 2 March 1968. Arsenal lost 1–0 to Terry Cooper’s first-half volley, their complaints that Jack Charlton and Norman Hunter had impeded goalkeeper Jim Furnell at the preceding corner bringing no change to the score, and Johnston could only watch as the Wembley occasion passed without him.
Arsenal’s season did not end at Wembley, but the defeat exposed the distance the side still had to travel and Johnston found himself caught in the middle of Mee’s rebuilding. The team went out of the FA Cup to Birmingham City after a fifth-round replay and finished ninth in the First Division despite winning their final five league matches, while behind the scenes Don Howe’s promotion to chief coach brought an even stronger emphasis on shape, fitness and clearly defined duties. Johnston had made a respectable beginning, yet respectable was not always enough at Highbury, particularly when Radford was growing into the central attacking position and the club were preparing to bring through more young players from the reserves. His opportunities almost disappeared in 1968–69, when he made only a handful of senior appearances and failed to score, and the frustration must have been considerable for a player who had been Cardiff’s leading marksman only three seasons earlier.
However, he did not simply vanish into reserve football and allow his standards to fall, because he captained Arsenal’s second string to the Football Combination title, giving the club evidence of his attitude even while his first-team prospects were narrowing. Arsenal again reached the League Cup final in 1969, this time losing 3–1 to Third Division Swindon Town after extra time, but Johnston was no longer near enough to the senior side to challenge seriously for a Wembley place. He ended his spell in north London with twenty-five first-team appearances and three goals, modest figures beside what Arsenal had hoped for when they signed him, though they require context: he had arrived at twenty, entered a side undergoing substantial change and found his route blocked by Radford before Ray Kennedy’s development created still more competition. The move had not produced the sustained First Division place Johnston wanted, but he had played at the top level, contributed to a cup run and led the reserves to a championship rather than letting disappointment overwhelm him.
PART THREE
A transfer was the sensible answer, and in May 1969 George Johnston joined Birmingham City, dropping into the Second Division in search of the regular football that Arsenal could no longer provide. Birmingham paid £30,000, placing a clear value on a forward who was still only twenty-two, but the circumstances at St Andrew’s were not especially easy. Stan Cullis, who had built the great Wolverhampton Wanderers teams of the previous decade, had taken charge in December 1965 and was trying to push Birmingham towards promotion, while the side contained experienced attackers such as Barry Bridges and Fred Pickering as well as the gifted Bob Latchford, who was beginning to establish himself. Johnston had effectively been brought in as a replacement for Pickering, yet he struggled to secure a settled place and the move that was supposed to restore his momentum instead brought another spell of uncertainty.
He made nine league outings during 1969–70 and scored once, with Birmingham finishing seventh after falling short of the promotion places, and as the months passed it became clear that Cullis did not regard him as a first-choice forward. The contrast with Cardiff was now pronounced, for Johnston had once been the young scorer around whom a sizeable part of the attack could be built, but at Arsenal and Birmingham he had entered established squads where every quiet match made the next selection less likely. He needed games, Birmingham could not offer them consistently, and in March 1970 he was allowed to join Walsall on loan for the closing weeks of the season. Walsall were struggling near the foot of Division Four under Bill Moore, so Johnston moved from a club hoping to reach the First Division to one fighting at the other end of the League, a sharp change in surroundings but also an opportunity to play without spending another Saturday among the reserves.
His period at Fellows Park was brief, amounting to five league appearances and one goal, and it did not become a permanent move, but it placed him back in competitive football and preceded a more rewarding transfer. Fulham paid Birmingham £6,000 for Johnston in September 1970, bringing him to Craven Cottage at a moment when Alec Stock’s team were trying to escape the Third Division. Fulham retained an old-fashioned glamour through their riverside ground and the presence of footballers of the likes of Johnny Haynes, Les Barrett, Steve Earle, Fred Callaghan, John Dempsey and Peter Mellor in the side raised expectation levels.
Johnston did not arrive as its central attraction, nor was he required to carry the scoring alone, but he added mobility and a useful number of goals as Fulham built a promotion challenge. He scored nine times in twenty-six league appearances during the 1970–71 campaign, a return that mattered because the margins near the top were tight and because Stock frequently adjusted his forward line according to form and opposition. Fulham stayed close to Preston North End through the season, and although they could not take the championship, they finished second with fifty-seven points, three behind Preston and four ahead of Halifax Town, thereby securing promotion to the Second Division.
For Johnston it was the first Football League promotion of his playing days, and it also represented his strongest season since leaving Cardiff. He had dropped from Arsenal to Birmingham, spent time on loan at Walsall and could easily have been labelled a forward in decline before his twenty-fourth birthday, but at Fulham he played regularly enough to regain his sharpness, scored at a steady rate and helped a well-supported old club move back towards the level its followers expected.
The step into the Second Division during 1971–72 proved harder, partly because Fulham strengthened their attack and partly because Johnston again found his appearances limited once the level rose. Alan Pinkney, Paul Went, Alan Mullery and other additions gave Stock more choices, while Barrett and Earle continued to offer goals from advanced positions, and Johnston made thirteen league appearances, scoring three times. His contribution was smaller than in the promotion season, but Fulham adapted comfortably after coming up, finishing in the upper half of the table and showing that their improvement had not depended on one short burst of form. Johnston, on the other hand, needed another decision. He was twenty-five, had played fewer than twenty league games across the preceding campaign and could see that remaining at Craven Cottage might mean another year spent moving between the first team and the margins of the squad.
PART FOUR
Johnston´s two seasons with Fulham had yielded thirty-nine league appearances and twelve goals, a healthy scoring rate when measured against the irregularity of his selection, yet the club were moving in a different direction and Hereford United offered a chance of a fresh beginning. There was also excitement around Edgar Street that no other Fourth Division club could quite match, because Hereford had beaten First Division Newcastle United in the FA Cup in February 1972, Ronnie Radford’s long-range equaliser and Ricky George’s extra-time winner turning the Southern League side into a national story. Election to the Football League followed that summer, replacing Barrow, and manager Colin Addison had to transform a part-time non-league group into a squad capable of handling forty-six league matches. Johnston joined for £3,000, bringing experience of every division from the First to the Fourth, and there was a neatness in the move: after years of trying to recover a settled position, he was entering a club where almost everything was beginning again.
Hereford’s first match as a Football League club ended in a 1–0 defeat at Colchester United on 12 August 1972, and four days later they travelled to Villa Park for their first League Cup tie, a severe assignment against Second Division Aston Villa. Hereford were beaten 4–1, but Johnston scored their goal and thereby became the first player to find the net for the club in a competitive fixture after its admission to the Football League. It was a small piece of history, yet a genuine one, and he was again involved when league football came to Edgar Street for the first time on 19 August.
Reading were the visitors, 8,839 spectators packed into a ground still undergoing work, and Addison selected David Potter in goal, Mick Mallender, Roger Griffiths, Alan Jones, Tommy Naylor and Kenny Wallace behind a front group containing himself, Radford, Clive Slattery, Ivan Hollett and Johnston. The opening goal arrived in the twenty-seventh minute when Johnston delivered a free-kick to the far post and Wallace headed in, giving Hereford their first Football League goal, while Addison made it 2–0 before half-time and Hollett completed a 3–0 victory five minutes from the end. Johnston nearly undid some of that work with an under-hit back-pass that forced Potter into a hurried save, but the day was remembered for Hereford’s convincing win and for a new team showing it belonged. The details of that first home League match, including Johnston’s free-kick for Wallace, have been preserved by Hereford supporters who witnessed the club’s entry into full-time football.
Hereford did more than survive. They began uncertainly and won only two of their opening fourteen league matches, which was understandable for a squad adjusting to full-time demands and unfamiliar opponents, but Addison kept faith with the basis of the side and the results improved. Johnston appeared eighteen times in the Fourth Division and scored five goals, while his experience gave Hereford another attacking option alongside Radford, Hollett, Kenny Wallace, Eric Redrobe and Brian Owen. He did not dominate the season and was not always in the starting side, yet his goals helped during the period in which the new League members turned early concern into a promotion challenge. Hereford eventually finished second behind Southport, winning twenty-six of their forty-six matches and collecting fifty-six points, and they went straight from the Southern League into the Third Division at the first attempt.
The achievement was particularly striking because the club had entered the Football League through election rather than promotion on the field, and there had been no certainty that the energy of the Newcastle cup victory would carry through an entire league programme. Johnston therefore earned his second promotion in three seasons, having helped Fulham climb from the Third Division in 1971 and Hereford leave the Fourth in 1973, although his role in each was different. At Fulham he had scored nine league goals and appeared in more than half the matches; at Hereford he was used less frequently, but he scored the club’s first goal in League Cup competition, supplied its first Football League goal and contributed five league goals to a promotion-winning side. Nevertheless, the pattern that had followed him since Arsenal returned once more, because the team advanced while his own place became less secure, and at the end of the season he left Edgar Street rather than moving into the Third Division with Addison’s squad.
Newport County became Johnston’s final Football League club in 1973, taking him back to south Wales and closer to the area that had become home after his move from Glasgow as a teenager. Newport were in the Fourth Division under Bobby Ferguson and endured a difficult 1973–74 season, finishing near the bottom of the table, but Johnston was unable to play enough matches to alter their fortunes or establish himself again. He appeared only three times in the League and did not score, and at twenty-six he stepped out of the professional game, an unusually early ending for a man who had been Cardiff’s leading scorer at eighteen and an Arsenal player at twenty. The bare figures can make the decline look abrupt: sixty league games and twenty-one goals for Cardiff, twenty-one and three for Arsenal, nine and one for Birmingham City, five and one while on loan at Walsall, thirty-nine and twelve for Fulham, eighteen and five for Hereford, then three without a goal for Newport.
After leaving League football in 1974, Johnston settled in Cardiff rather than returning permanently to Glasgow, which was hardly surprising when the Welsh capital had shaped so much of his adult life. Cardiff City had brought him south as a boy, made him a professional, introduced him to senior football and given him the happiest sustained period he enjoyed in the game, while south Wales remained a familiar base even after his moves around England. He later worked for a marine engineering company, exchanging the weekly uncertainty of selection and results for employment far removed from packed grounds and transfer fees.