Wolves goalkeeper hoping for derby day success over former club
Sam Johnstone hopes a Wolves win on derby day against his former club can kickstart their season and battle against relegation.
The goalkeeper, who earned his starting berth from Jose Sa this season, took on his former club Crystal Palace last week and does the same again on Sunday.
Johnstone represented Villa over two loan spells in 2017 and 2018 and now is aiming to propel Wolves to a first win of the season at Villa Park.
He said: “Another previous club on Sunday. Every game's difficult, but hopefully we take the positives out of last week. We've been together this week and it's a game of football and anything can happen on the day.
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“I played in this game the other way around, and last year at Villa, and there's a great atmosphere. It'll be a good game, and hopefully we come out on top. As soon as you get that one win, hopefully sooner rather than later, we can take that into training, and into the next games. We just need that to go our way to start picking points up.
“Everybody knows the manager’s really positive, a really, really good guy. He's getting his message across in the right way and with good training sessions. Hopefully things are picked up quickly, and we can progress.
“We’re working everything now. We're working defensively, working where we need to be, what we have to do, throughout the whole pitch.
"We might be defending the edge of our box, but the manager expects those up front to still be doing a job.
"It's all 11 of us doing a job defensively and attacking. It's obvious what we need to work on. It's doing it every day, working hard, and then things, hopefully, should turn.”
This week has been the first time new head coach Rob Edwards has had a full training schedule with the squad.
Johnstone admits the new boss is addressing things that were previously 'swept under the carpet' and has urged Wolves to adapt quickly.
Johnstone added: “Last week was a bit different with the internationals coming back at different times of the week. This week's been the first that the manager has had the whole squad working together every day. He'll be happy with that, and we're happy with that.
“Saturday was a difficult game, but some players only came back on the Thursday, Friday, and the manager hadn’t had time with us yet. He's obviously doing things that are very different to what we've been doing before.
“He's having to put a lot of things right that was probably swept under the carpet before. It's going to take time for them things to change, but we all know that we haven't got a lot of time, so we need to take it on board quickly and try to change it as soon as possible.”
