It’s been a long, long time but Watford’s 80s heroes, who miss the turf so much, touch down once more
It’s the REAL Fever Pitch as the A
AMONG the cast of Watford’s original golden boys, Hornets godfather Graham Taylor will always be one in a bullion.
Tribute acts rarely do justice to the original trailblazer, but when four footsoldiers of Watford’s rise from obscurity to unprecedented orbit are reunited on stage tomorrow night, the adulation will be sincere.
Luther Blissett, Ross Jenkins, Steve Sherwood and Ian Bolton were the Rocket Men who played in all four divisions when Taylor reached for the stars at Vicarage Road from 1977-87.
Now they are collaborating again, launching their assorted memoirs from one of English football’s greatest feelgood stories with a special chat-show at Watford’s Palace Theatre.
Blissett was the prodigy who became a town’s favourite son – even when he flew the Hornets nest in 1983 for a gap year with AC Milan.
According to one apocryphal version of the former England striker’s £1million move to the San Siro, the Italian giants sent a scout to run the rule over John Barnes but signed Blissett (above, with Barnes) by mistake.
As an urban myth, it was both fatuous and offensive – but years later it was still being recycled as valid speculation.
Blissett, who remained close to Taylor before the ex-England manager’s death at the age of 72 last January, was not amused.
He said: “To say Milan made a mistake because there were two black players on the same side and they got them mixed up is racist. Milan had told the world they were looking for a goalscorer – so are they going to come after a guy who scored 33 goals in all competitions that season, more than any other striker in Europe, or his teammate, who was a wonderful player but who scored 13?”
Blissett’s move to Serie A was famously sealed in the offices of a Savile Row tailor, with the player, manager Taylor, rock star chairman Elton John (below with Taylor), and chief executive Eddie Plumley weaving through racks of coats and jackets to meet Milan president Giuseppe Farina.
At the time, Blissett was joining a select group of English players who had fetched £1m fees, but he says the modern transfer market has lost touch with sanity.
He said: “If you apply figures from today’s market to the time when Milan signed me, how much would it have cost to buy the top goalscorer in Europe’s major leagues in 2017? You are talking £120m and, I’m sorry, that is outrageous. Football is losing all sense of the value of money.” Now approaching his 60th birthday, Blissett was a pioneer among black players forging careers in the professional game at a time when the sickening ‘monkey hoot’ was a call to arms for primitives on the terraces. In the book, he recalls his first experience of racism in a midweek reserve game at Millwall. Along with Barnes and Worrell Sterling, Blissett was once serenaded by hundreds of Leeds fans barking ‘Sieg Heil’ with Nazi salutes in a 4-0 win at Elland Road. Watford’s capitulation at Goodison Park last weekend reminded goalkeeper Sherwood how their luck has changed little against Everton since Andy Gray’s controversial air raid in the 1984 FA Cup final. And Bolton has come to relish his role as the arch-villain of the Hornets’ so-called kick-and-rush approach under Taylor. In an era when Glenn Hoddle was celebrated for landing 50-yard passes on a sixpence, Bolton’s raking delivery over a similar range was damned with faint praise as longball optimism. As a measure of the enduring affection for Taylor’s cast of Rocket Men, tickets for their chat show sold out in minutes.