Football: Millwall v Yeovil Town: Johnson looks forward to kick-off

YEOVIL Town manager Gary Johnson cannot wait to get the 2013-14 season in the Sky Bet Championship underway – starting tomorrow (Saturday, August 3) and a trip to Millwall.

The Glovers might well be odds-on favourites for relegation, but Yeovil were certainties – according to the bookies – to suffer the drop last season in League One and look what happened!

And although Johnson knows that the odds are stacked up against him and his personnel, he will have them firing on all cylinders to rise to the challenge and to prove the doubters wrong.

He has said that he wants everyone connected to the club to use each match as a “celebration” of what the club has achieved – especially considering that they have only been in the Football League for a decade.

But Johnson does not want Yeovil to be just making up the numbers.

“We want to go out and compete at this level,” he said. “We’re all really looking forward to it. We’ve worked very hard during the summer and we’ve put a squad together which I think will be able to compete in The Championship.”

He has brought in a number of new signings to bolster the squad, while he has kept faith with the vast majority of the squad which gained promotion from League One last season in that never-to-be-forgotten Play-Off Final win over Brentford at Wembley Stadium on May 19.

“The boys that got us promoted last year deserve their chance in the Championship,” he said.

He has been working hard to impress on his players – especially the younger ones in the squad – that they should not be daunted by some of the names of some of the clubs they will be coming up against.

The likes of Leeds United and Nottingham Forest, for example, are massive names in English football. But at the end of the day it will be 11 x 11 on a pitch and Johnson believes his team will be able to compete.

Johnson has said that he will keep to usual method of looking at the season in ten-match sections to see what needs doing in regards “fine-tuning” his personnel.

Yeovil’s first ten league games of the 2013-14 season are Millwall (Aug 3 – away); Birmingham City (August 10 – home); Burnley (August 17 – away); Derby County (August 24 – home); Reading (August 31 – home); Sheffield Wednesday (September 14 – away); Ipswich Town (September 17 – away); Queens Park Rangers (September 21 – home); Bolton Wanderers (September 28 – away); Leicester City (October 1 – home).

Wow! Yeovil fans will be pinching themselves to make sure that this is really happening.

It is.....let the adventure begin.

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Yeovil Town FC.