Brought up in a little town outside Stockholm and never having played professional football, Johansson was in charge at Rosenborg in Norway before his date with destiny in Motherwell.
A template was set by Askou for fast-flowing, attacking football with the back door well and truly bolted shut. It yielded a campaign for the ages for the Motherwell faithful who flocked back to Fir Park in their ecstatic droves.
So what will Alfredball look like?
“I want intensity, I want tempo,” he said. “I want to play out from the back, I want to be constructive in the way that we attack.
“We build attacks looking for advantages on an individual level. Collectively, we have to be strong units when we press and when we have to sit a little bit deeper at times.
“It’s a privilege to come to a well-run locker room, to a well-run training session. The players, in the first real session that we had yesterday, ran the show by themselves in a really nice manner.
“I obviously have my own ideas which will affect how the team is expressed on the pitch.”
And what about retaining last season’s star performers?
“Motherwell for the last many years has been losing the best players almost every summer and equally evident for me is that they’ve been really good in scouting and recruitment,” said Johansson.
“All these brilliant players that we have, I feel they are fully committed. They’ve been training brilliantly, they’ve been coming back in really good shape. I’m fully committed and I’m also very calm.”