Lee Johnson believes Ryan Porteous is being targeted on the pitch by opposition players.
The Hibs boss reckons his defender is being actively sought out by his opposition, with the manager worried the stopper would be driven out of Scottish football as a result. The Easter Road gaffer thinks Porteous now has a "reputation" that means the spotlight always shines on him. And the boss insists that attention means his player is marked out for special treatment, causing concern that the 23-year-old might want to jump out of the Scottish league if it continues.
Johnson was asked about the upcoming introduction of VAR in the cinch Premiership, with his side's clash against St Johnstone next week the first to use the new technology. The Leith manager believes one major upside of the system will be aid provided to referees when it comes to picking up off the ball incidents, highlights an alleged elbow from Dundee United's Ryan Edwards on Porteous as a recent example.
“Well, I think there’s got to be an awareness,” the Hibs manager said. “Absolutely. You know, the off-the-ball stuff should get caught, but it doesn’t get caught enough in my opinion, at this level, at the time or retrospectively. We had a big one where Ryan Porteous just received a really heavy elbow off the ball, didn’t get picked up, didn’t get spoken about it.”
The Hibs boss went on to discuss the Porteous, who made his Scotland debut last month, was attracting the wrong kind of attention.
“I think as an example, Ryan Porteous just needs a lot more protection than he’s getting at the moment,” he said. “He’s actively being targeted, which is quite interesting and I think he showed great maturity not to react in those situations.
“So this is not any one incident now I’m talking about. I just think you’ve got a Scottish player that’s young, extremely talented, now in the national set-up, that has got a reputation."
Johnson reckons the scale of the English game could appeal to Porteous, as there'd be less of a focus on him. He continued: "I feel it’s more diluted in England because of the number of clubs you have in the league. Whereas here the intensity is so focused, it’s such a goldfish bowl in terms of the media and the amount of times that players and managers will come across each other, I think sometimes there can be a subliminal bias against some players.
“So I think that I just feel like he is a bit like he might want to jump out of the Scottish league for that exact reason because he feels that that target was there on or off the pitch.
“It’s something that as a manager, of a player I think extremely high of, I have to try and step in and look after it.
“It is a concern. You could end up losing players for that type of scenario, if they don’t feel like they are being protected and they think they are being targeted. You could want to move on and that could be one of the reasons for that.”
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