Yeovil Town manager Gary Johnson has said that he wants to see standards raised within and around Yeovil Town Football Club in an effort to improve the way the club is run. The Glovers boss was speaking in the wake of a mid-week match that saw him fail to show for a midweek press conference, after the club's 3-0 win over Colchester United in the League Cup.
Whilst the win impressed Johnson, his assistant Terry Skiverton admitted after the game that the gaffer was hopping mad about certain aspects of the evening, with the broad implication that the quality of the Huish Park pitch had upset him. Two days later, Gary seems to have calmed down enough to speak to the press about his reasons for leaving the ground straight after the game ended. Choosing his words often carefully and slowly, he told BBC Somerset that he felt very emotional about getting the standards at the football club right, both on and off the pitch:
"You get all emotions, don't you, when you come into a football match. They all revolve around you trying to get the standards right. So you have high emotions of being happy, because the players got to a performance level where we've raised the standard. I'm looking for that from everywhere around the club, as are everyone else who is part of the club. Some people have different standards to others. I just want to keep pushing because I want this football club to go as far as it can. We've got to start acting and being like a League One club, which it has been for a little while now."
"So there are a lot of people who are trying to improve standards, and keep pushing and shoving, and I'm one that does that, and some of our Directors want to do that. But we have to get into those people who have not quite got those standards that we've got, and make sure that they raise them. If they do, then we'll all be happy."
Gary said that good standards were as important during the week as well as on matchdays, pointing out that for his team to put on good performances on the Huish Park main pitch, they also needed to perform well in training. Revealing that his team are currently not training at the club's Alvington venue, which they only took over in the summer, he said that finding an adequate surface required his players to travel 'half an hour' from the club:
"When you get a football team that is in your own image, and a team where you know how you want to play, then you've got to have the best facilities to do that. That includes training grounds as well. It includes maybe the Council trying to help us as well - do you know what I mean? At the moment we're having to travel half an hour up the road because our training grounds are impossible to train on."
"For a League One club, that is poor. There are people working hard to try to change that, but we need to try harder, and we need to get that right properly. That's because if you're going to play the type of football that I want us to play, then you have to train that way. Then obviously your surface is so important to the way your team plays."
The Yeovil boss added that what his team showed against Colchester showed what they were capable of, if given a good environment to play in. However, he said that there needed to be decisive 'action' within the Glovers ranks to help push the club onwards:
"You can see we've got running power in our team, and you can see that we're trying to play one or two touch. The ball needs to get across the ground, and everybody knows how I want to play, and I think it reminded people that it needs type of surface. Sometimes I get a little bit disappointed when I see that it's not quite right for what we need, when we know the exact measurements. People sometimes have excuses of this, that and the other. But I don't want excuses, we need action. That's not having a go at any one person, or any one department. It's saying 'Look this is us, as a football club'. We need the best facilities that we can, out there and inside the stadium. We've got to keep pushing to improve our standard and that's the main thing."
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16 August 2012 : 
