Position: Midfield
From: Youth team
Record: Played: 1 Scored: 0
To: Lewes - contract terminated - September 1997
Career stats: Soccerbase
He was: Andy's brother
One of the most promising products of the Watford youth system in recent
years, Chris Johnson's career appears to have taken a fairly calamitous wrong turn at some
point. In his first year as a professional, he should've been pressing his case for
inclusion in the first team - instead he and his brother were sacked by Graham Taylor for breaches
of club rules regarding alcohol, thus thwarting attempts to field an entire
Watford side made up of players named Johnson.
We could spend all day speculating on the reasons for their demise (personally,
I suspect a case of Ramage Syndrome - players more in love with the idea
of being footballers than the practice), yet it's probably pointless. Just as
there will always be careers terminated by injury, so there will always be careers
terminated by general twattishness. Boys will be boys.
Shame, though, because what I saw of Chris Johnson was really very good indeed.
A midfielder with an eye for a through-ball as well as a firm tackle, he
appeared to be one of the young players most likely to find a first team role at
the start of the 1996/97 season. His debut, a 2-0 defeat against Plymouth Argyle at
Vicarage Road, gave us twenty minutes of commitment and invention before he
disappeared from the game - but that possibly had something to do with us spending
the entire match wellying the ball over his head in the general direction of
Devon White...
Since then, he appeared to be getting further away from the first team rather
than closer to it - perhaps that's explained by his ultimate demise via the
seemingly irresistible temptations of Kudos, perhaps other factors intervened.