WHEN Steve Lansdown, the Bristol City chairman, addressed the team at the start of the season he spoke about consolidation and the imperative of staying out of the Championship’s bottom three. Promoted from League One last season, 40-1 outsiders to secure a second successive promotion, the cautious note that he sounded made sense but he was swiftly rebuked. “We’re going to be competing at the other end of the table,” several players confidently assured him.

The likes of Lee Trundle, Lee Johnson, Steve Brooker, Bradley Orr, Jamie McCombe and others may have lacked experience at Championship level but they made up for this shortfall with the depth of their ambition. Quietly, Lansdown has spoken about his desire to transform the Robins into the “Manchester United of the west” and at the very least there are players at the club ready to take on the Manchester United of the north-west from next season.

They still have much to do, of course, and a run of one win out of seven games is not promotion form. However, manager Gary Johnson’s philosophy is to accentuate the positive, so the fact that they remain in the fight for another ascension is emphasised, the pictures of last season’s promotion which adorn the walls of the dressing room ready to be replaced, if Premier League status is secured.

While many expect their challenge to crumble, Johnson and the young squad he has put together since taking over in September 2005, when the club was bottom of League One, have different ideas. Johnson was assistant manager to John Beck at Cambridge when the U’s rose from the bottom division in the early 1990s to within a couple of games of being the first club to go all the way to the top tier in successive seasons.

He winces at some of the tactics which were deployed at the Abbey Stadium in an effort to unnerve more cultured rivals but the same combative qualities is in evidence today at Ashton Gate.

“We left no stone unturned as far as one-upmanship was concerned, though we never did anything that was illegal,” he recalled. The pitch wouldn’t always be the best for clever football-playing teams. We didn’t dig it up but we would train on it all week and ask the groundsman not to sort it out.

Footballs would be soaked in the bath overnight before games, so that the opposition had to warm up with horrible, soggy balls.”

There have been no such shenanigans under Johnson at Bristol, just a work ethic which has driven them towards the brink of historic achievement. “The players that we brought in here are very ambitious and they’re a confident group,” said Johnson. “They wouldn’t have expected me to say anything less than, ‘We’re going for promotion’, when we started the season and the mood of optimism that we’ve created has sustained our challenge when many people might have expected it to fizzle out.

“The chairman and the board of directors have been magnificent and when I’ve asked for players like Lee Trundle, who cost £1m from Swansea and Nick Carle, who cost £500,000 from Genclerbirligi in Turkey, and Dele Adebola, I’ve been backed all the way.”

Johnson’s progression has been unorthodox, for he was more successful in establishing a soccer schools business than as a player at Watford – “I must have played a record number of reserve team games, for the player-manger, Mike Keen, played in my position” – or as a part-timer in Sweden. Newmarket Town provided a route into management and after his association with Beck at Cambridge he became manager of Kettering Town before he was appointed director of Watford’s youth academy by Graham Taylor in 1997. A chance meeting with a Russian businessman led to an invitation to assess the Latvian national team, which soon evolved into a formal offer to become the Latvian coach, a role he accepted in 1999 before returning to England with non-league Yeovil. Victory in the FA Trophy was followed by the Conference championship and promotion to League One.

“When I was approached by Bristol City people didn’t think that I’d leave Yeovil because they were above us in the table but we were getting 19,000 gates at Ashton Gate and the vehicle was there to make a real go of it,” he said. “Promotion to the Premier League could be worth up to £60m or £70m and we’d have the opportunity to compete with the best in the world, but we have a lot of work to do before this will be possible and over the next few weeks that’s what we will aim to do.”