Here's an article from Paul Kent about AJ,
Alex Johnston doesn’t look like the modern winger.
Modern wingers are built how second-rowers used to be built, with barrel chests and sneers.
Worse, they are measured like front-rowers.
The key quality for a winger nowadays is to be a good yardage man out of trouble. A guy who can do the tough carries, and all that.
All Alex Johnstone can do, it seems, is score tries.
Johnston plays his 200th game Saturday night but, more than that, he sits fifth on the all-time try scoring list behind Ken Irvine (212), Billy Slater (190), Steve Menzies (180) and Brett Morris (176), with 169.
He is chasing the one individual record most thought impossible to beat.
In many ways, Irvine’s record sits somewhere around St George’s 11 straight premierships, or Bradman’s 99.94 batting average or Winx’s four successive WS Cox Plates.
Or, in a timely fashion, Wayne Bennett’s 900 games coached in the NRL, which he will achieve a couple of hours before Johnston hits his 200 mark tonight at Suncorp Stadium.
You can see them from afar, but only if you squint.
It was a thought only reinforced when Slater fell short by 22 tries when he retired in 2018. That’s it, most thought, Irvine’s record will stand forever.
Adding to their belief was that Slater played 323 games over 16 seasons, a clear advantage over Irvine’s 236 games, and as deadly as even he was, he would have needed another season, and possibly two, to surpass Irvine.
Johnston is in his 10th season.
If it takes persistence to break the record, though, then Johnston just might be the man.
He has had more than one chance to throw it all in.
In many ways Johnston nearly became victim to the modern bias for wingers employed to carry the ball out of yardage.
Not particularly big, the Rabbitohs’ brains trust got together and figured he had no future at the club. They wanted someone bigger, more robust, in keeping with the modern trend.
Fans were outraged, of course.
They recognised Johnston as not only one of the game’s most under-appreciated players, but
South Sydney through and through.
Johnston didn’t want to leave the Rabbitohs but the choice wasn’t his.
So as Melbourne circled the fans petitioned the club, demanding the Rabbitohs re-sign him.
Finally it took Wayne Bennett to recognise what was sitting right in front of them.
Johnston was a pure finisher.
Who cared if he was a little light in the carriage and didn’t find those early metres everybody else was so focused on. What he did was simply find a way to get the ball over the tryline, and more often than most.
And isn’t that what the game is about?
In many ways he was a throwback, to a time when wingers were judged on nothing more than their ability to score.
Like when Irvine played.
So Johnston re-signed, Melbourne eventually signing Xavier Coates instead.
While Johnston refuses to talk about Irvine’s record you can be sure he is determined to beat it. He holds the record far more closely than he lets on.
Asked this week about it Johnston shrugged it off, saying all he was interested in was helping South Sydney win games and, if he did that, the tries would take care of itself.
There were several reasons he was asked.
The first was that Johnston finds himself in the unusual position of being absent from this season’s top tryscorer’s list.
After nine games he has scored just three tries.
The second is related to the first, which goes that teammate Campbell Graham actually is on the tryscorer’s list, with 11 tries, which is also unusual because Graham plays on South Sydney’s right side.
Call it an unhealthy advantage but, for years, South Sydney has been a left-side dominant team in terms of attack, the ball zipping from Cody Walker to Latrell Mitchell and then usually to Johnston.
So much, some rival teams began stacking an extra defender on that side of the field in attempts to stench the blood flow.
Their right side was anaemic, little more than afterthought by rivals.
So this year the Rabbitohs have moved to fix their bias, pushing more attack down their right side, which is benefiting Graham nicely, even if it has put the slows on Johnston.
It rounds out the Rabbitohs to be a far more balanced team even if, the suspicion goes, to beat the good sides they are going to let their stars on the left have a free rein.
Still, it raises the question whether Johnston will get to Irvine’s record at all.
What seemed the most likely shot yet at claiming the record suddenly has the wobbles.
His manager Steve Gillis said yesterday there was no time frame on when he hoped to break the record but, all being equal, he hoped to get it in about three years.
“He’ll fill grandstands when he gets close,” Gillis said.
“It’s going to be a big moment in the game.”
At 28, time is on his side. Johnston believes he has at least another five seasons left in him.
Providing he stays on the same trajectory he will eclipse Irvine’s record, of course, a record that has stood for 50 years now.
But the great unknown is what stands between now and the 43 more tries he needs.
Irvine’s record has stood for 50 years for a reason.
