Brennan Johnson re-opens his Instagram account

Back in September, it was pretty well documented and publicised that Tottenham forward Brennan Johnson had deactivated his Instagram account, having suffered some severe abuse by angry fans after the North London derby on the 15th of September. Today, he has reopened his account - brenjohnson_ being his handle.

Recently, Johnson spoke about it for the first time, saying “It was just a split decision in the moment where I thought ‘I’ll just delete it’, which I have kind of done before when I deleted the app, and this time I thought I’d just deactivate my account, but it wasn’t a massive deal for me.

He explained that it didn’t change his approach, and his form, where he scored five goals in five games, and six in six including a game for Wales, came as a result of his hard work instead.

"I think, naturally, it can be a distraction and everyone’s probably guilty of scrolling for too long and things like that. It wasn’t anything too tactical and it definitely wasn’t to try to enhance and improve my game or add something different – it was just a personal decision I made instead,” he added.

All the training and hard work never stopped throughout. I didn’t change my approach as I always come in and try to do the best I can here because l love this team.” He also gave credit to first team coach Ryan Mason.

Now that he is back on the popular social media app, it checks out with his claim that it wasn’t a massive deal for him. Whilst no player is going to want to explain to an interviewer that he deactivated because of abuse, a number of players have said in the past that social media can be a very time consuming distraction, and they feel better off without it.

In any case, Spurs fans can be reassured by Johnson’s claim that his form is simply down to hard work, otherwise some may have feared that his run of form was over.

Of course, some will bring up the fact that he didn’t score in the win over West Ham, but his performance was still fairly good, going close on a few occasions and being a menace to the Hammers backline.

Ange thought he played very well too, saying: “I mentioned it to the lads, I know Brennan Johnson didn’t score today but I thought that was his best performance for us with the amount of work he did to help out Pedro [Porro] and help out the team in a defensive capacity and still be a threat going the other way.”