Jonno comes home after two years with Crawley Down Gatwick
They will be dancing in the streets of Hassocks following the news that fan favourite Phil Johnson is to return to the Beacon for the 2022-23 season.
One of the most popular players to pull on a Robins shirt in the past 10 years, it will be Johnson’s third spell as a Robin after spending the past two seasons with Crawley Down Gatwick.
A product of Hassocks’ youth system, Johnson first burst onto the scene with a sensational hat-trick for the Under 18s in their 3-2 Southern Combination Youth League Cup final win over Arundel at the end of the 2007-08 campaign.
He made his first team debut that same season, before moving to university in the summer of 2008. It would be the 2011-12 campaign before Hassocks fans saw him in first team action again and he featured sporadically over the next three seasons when his law studies allowed.
Once all that education was out the way, Johnson established himself as the Robins’ talisman in 2014-15. The loss of players like Phil Gault and Anthony Hibbert along with injury problems for Nathan Miles left Hassocks looking short of firepower until Johnson stepped up to the plate.
His 26 goals from 39 appearances hauled the Robins away from the relegation zone in the second half of the campaign, earning him a clean sweep of Players’ Player, Managers’ Player and Supporters’ Player of the Season awards.
Burgess Hill Town were suitably impressed and so Johnson moved to Leylands Park for the start of the 2015-16 season. A very brief spell at Haywards Heath Town followed before a move to Horsham YMCA.
Johnson spent two-and-a-half years at Gorings Mead, scoring 53 times in 102 appearances. He was brought back to the Beacon by Mark Dalgleish in the summer of 2018 with his second spell at the Beacon lasting two seasons.
In the first of those, Johnson scored 27 goals from 40 matches to fire Hassocks to 12th spot – their highest finishing position of the past eight seasons.
Following an injury-hit 2019-20 campaign which featured a broken leg and was brought to a premature end by lockdown, Johnson moved to Crawley Down for the start of the 2020-21 campaign.
In two seasons at the Haven, Johnson netted 30 times from 47 appearances. 23 of those came in the 2021-22 campaign, despite Johnson spending most of the second half of the season out injured.
He currently sits sixth in the Hassocks all-time senior scorers list with 76 goals from 163 matches. Only Gault, Hibbert, James Laing, Robbie Kitchen and Pat Harding have more.
With new head coach James Westlake having made Harding his first signing of the summer, Hassocks fans can look forward to the prospect of seeing two forwards with a combined total of over 200 Hassocks goals potentially lining up in the same team next season.
Welcome home, Jonno. Everyone at the Beacon (and the Hassocks Hotel) is delighted to have you back.
