'Quinn can bring club success'

The former Cliftonville and Coleraine man has linked up with the manager for the third time in his career and is looking forward to re-igniting his Irish League career having spent the first half of the season on loan at Shamrock Rovers where he only played seven matches.

On his return from that loan spell, the 29-year-old asked Glenavon boss, Quinn to allow him the use of the club’s training facilities and the midfielder clearly impressed the gaffer as he was soon snapped up on a one-year contract. Johnston claims it was Quinn’s presence at the club that persuaded him to sign that contract for the Lurgan Blues.

“The biggest factor was Marty (Quinn,) having played for him before at Cliftonville and Coleraine,” he told the ‘MAIL.’

“I was delighted when he gave me the chance to train with Glenavon and the players and coaches were all great, so when the opportunity to sign came along it was a pretty easy decision to make. I’ve signed a one-year contract but if Marty’s still here after that, I’d have no problems in staying on.

“The training’s brilliant. Davy (Dorrian) and Jeff (Montgomery) have really good sessions and you can tell that they put a bit of time in and that they care about their work. They really show a bit of interest in the players.”

Johnston has high hopes for his new side, claiming that, under Quinn, Irish Cup success, followed by a title challenge in the Carling Premiership is not out of reach in the next few seasons.

“Marty’s looking a good Irish Cup run as well as a top six finish this year and then to build on that for next season,” he said.

“ I trust him because he’s had success wherever he’s been and he’s definitely a huge reason for me signing for Glenavon. I don’t want to be playing for a team who are going to be struggling at the bottom of the table.

“Who knows what we can achieve if the board back Marty properly and he can get the players that he wants in. He’ll get quality players in and we’ll all play for him because he’s always had successful teams.

“Everything’s in place. There’s no reason why this club can’t be challenging for a title, maybe even next year or the year after. For this season, I think we can get a run in the Irish Cup because we’re good enough to beat anyone on our day, as the lads showed at the start of the season.”

Johnston began his career under Quinn’s stewardship at Cliftonville before he left for America, where he played for William Carey University from 2000 to 2002. On his return to Northern Ireland, Johnston again teamed up with Quinn, this time at Coleraine but the midfielder recalls how he found it difficult to break into the starting 11 at the Showgrounds.

“After playing for William Carey for two seasons, I came home and Marty asked me to go up to Coleraine,” he said.

“I knew him from my time as a young guy at Cliftonville and I knew Pat McAllister and Fra Murphy, who were also at Coleraine, well so I travelled up from Belfast with them.

“I didn’t play much up there. Fra and me were both young and he was trying to get Stephen Beattie’s place and I was battling against Tony Gorman and Pat McAllister. It was good experience and I learnt a lot off them but at the end of the day, I needed to play football and whenever Cliftonville gave me the opportunity, I was grateful for the chance to go and play first-team football.”

Johnston then re-joined his boyhood club and it was here where he enjoyed his most successful spell of his career to date, even making it into the Belfast Telegraph’s Irish League Select XI for the 2007-2008 campaign.

However, the talented midfielder’s time at Solitude came to an abrupt end when he was seen as surplus to requirements this season, leaving for a loan spell at Shamrock Rovers before signing his permanent deal at Glenavon.

“I’m a Cliftonville supporter so to get the chance to play for them, to play good football and to be relatively successful was brilliant,” he began, speaking with evident affection for the North Belfast side.

“However, my time there had more or less run its course. People had to go and maybe I had got a bit too comfortable and didn’t play as well as I could have in my last season there.

“I thought I would have played out my contract at Cliftonville but it turned out that Glenavon and Cliftonville agreed a fee and Eddie (Patterson, Cliftonville manager) told me that I could leave. I’m not going to make a big thing of it and I’m not going to run Cliftonville through the mud because I’m still a Cliftonville supporter.”

However, Johnston’s final game for the club was possibly the worst ending imaginable for the Cliftonville fan as he and his team lost the Irish Cup final to bitter rivals, Crusaders.

“My last game at the club definitely wasn’t a highlight,” he began, the disappointment still in his voice.

“I’m a bad loser and whenever we lost that I threw my loser’s medal into the crowd. I’ve done that before; I don’t think I have a single loser’s medal in my house. I hate losing, and to lose to Crusaders felt like we’d let the whole of Cliftonville down.”

Despite playing only seven games during his ensuing loan spell at Shamrock Rovers, Johnston was impressed with the full-time set up of the League of Ireland but claims that, with regards to quality, the Irish League is on a par with its southern counterpart.

“It was unbelievable down there,” he began.

“I want to go into management whenever my playing career’s over and to play under a manager like Michael O’Neill was brilliant. It’s a different level of coaching and management down there. We were training full-time and we always did a full week’s training geared towards that weekend’s game against the specific side we were playing against.

“It was unbelievable. Up here, you can’t get the time with only training twice a week. The levels of fitness are also far better down there because of the full-time training but I think players from this league like Ronan Scannell or George McMullan who I played with at Cliftonville would have no problems playing down south at all.

“They have the ability but it’s the levels of fitness and the sharpness of the players that is totally different. It took me a month of full-time training to catch up with the other guys at the club.”

Back in the Irish League, Johnston is now wishing to use his full-time training to his advantage and restart his career at Mourneview Park, using his typical all guns firing approach to win over the Glenavon faithful.

“I just want to prove myself to a new set of fans,” he said.

“I’m quite a driven person and I’m confident in my own abilities so I’ll just go out and play. I’m a fully committed player and I’d never pull out of a tackle or anything so the fans usually appreciate that!”