In a way, Johansson had one of the most unenviable jobs upon his appointment. Filling the very large boots left by Askou.<\/p>\n
Despite only spending one season in the Scottish Premiership, the Dane attracted so many admirers – far beyond Lanarkshire – through his approach, attitude and style of football.<\/p>\n
It’s remarkable how seamlessly Johansson has picked up where he left off. Even more so considering key performers Elijah Just, Elliot Watt, Callum Slattery and Calum Ward also moved on.<\/p>\n
Few people had a better view of the now-Toulouse boss’ brilliance than Halliday – who spent his last playing year under Askou’s eye – and he says “a lot of the fundamentals are very similar” under Johansson.<\/p>\n
Halliday, who apparently jumped out his seat at Said’s second goal against the Finns, added on BBC Sportsound: “I love what Motherwell stand for, how progressive they are, trying to do it a completely different way that’s proven, surely to everyone, that it can work.<\/p>\n
“Squad development, the youth academy, playing a brilliant brand of football and the fact they lost a fantastic coach and manager last year to go out and recruit similar, I love it.”<\/p>\n
Invested like many others, the former midfielder does maintain that a signing or two – particularly a goalscoring forward – would be the final piece of the captivating puzzle.<\/p>\n
“In wider Scottish football, I hope people sit up and take note of what they’re doing,” Halliday added.<\/p>\n
“I really hope they sign one or two more players at the top end of the pitch, because if they do that, I think they could be every bit as good as last year.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a way, Johansson had one of the most unenviable jobs upon his appointment. Filling the very large…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":737359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-737358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=737358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/737359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=737358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=737358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=737358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}