Watford could do with some old Taylor magic
A year on from his death, club’s most successful manager will be honoured at Vicarage Road, writes Tom Cary
By the time of Taylor’s death, there had been a welcome and long overdue reappraisal
There is an amusing story in Graham Taylor’s posthumously published autobiography about the time his upwardly mobile Watford team were on a flight to Australia for a post-season tour after winning promotion from the old Second Division in 1982.
Alan Ball, then in his dotage at Southampton, happened to be on the same flight and, according to Taylor anyway, was leading his Watford players astray, plying them with beer and teasing them about how they played a long-ball game. “Wait until you get into the First Division,” England’s World Cup-winner taunted. “We’ll show you how to play proper football.”
“I got a bit wound up by it,” Taylor admitted.
A few weeks later, Watford – enjoying a fast start to their first season in the top flight – walloped Southampton 4-1 at the Dell. “I waited on the touchline for Alan as the players came off the pitch,” Taylor recalls in In His Own Words ( Peloton Publishing £19.99). “It was typical of me, really, I couldn’t let it go. ‘ Not bad for a side that can’t f------ play, are we?’
“I said it with a bit of a smile on my face and, to be fair, Alan took it well. ‘Hey, credit where it’s ts due,’ he said. ‘If you carry on like that, you will l shock a few people.’” ”
Watford did that all right, finishing second nd to Liverpool that season, n, just seven years after r being a middling Fourth urth Division side.
The story is typical al of what is a very gentle tle stroll through Taylor’s r’s life – throughout which hich he kept diaries – in that hat it shows the former England manager to be a proud man, sensitive e to any perceived slight. . But ultimately, even when en riled or harbouring a grudge, fundamentally ally good-natured; unable le to be unkind.
Yesterday marked one year to the day since Taylor died, aged 72, prompting an outpouring of affection for England’s most famous root vegetable.
The “Swedes 2, Turnips 1” headline in The Sun, with Taylor’s head being morphed into a turnip – plus the ridi ridicule he received after the subsequent airing of the documentary An Impossible Imp Job – for a long tim time threatened to define his career. But, by the tim time of his death, there ha had been a welcome and lon long overdue re reappraisal.
What Taylor ac achieved, certainly in the first half of his ma managerial career at Lin Lincoln City, alongside Elto Elton John at Watford from 1977 to 1987, and, fina finally, at Aston Villa, was not nothing short of extr extraordinary.
W Watford could do with som some of the old Taylor mag magic today. Seven def defeats in their last nine leag league games have bro brought their bright start to the t season grinding to a halt. ha While they still sit 10th, they are only five points above the relegation zone and fans have been encouraged to turn Vicarage Road into “a sea of Watford scarves” today to honour their former manager, and perhaps to summon his spirit.
Coincidentally, Southampton are today’s visitors, which may be a good omen.
It was against the Saints that Watford produced one of their most stirring performances under Taylor. It came a couple of seasons before his revenge over Ball, when they were still in the Second Division and they overturned a 4-0 League Cup deficit with a 7-1 win at Vicarage Road on a day when Lawrie Mcmenemy rested Kevin Keegan, thinking the tie was in the bag.
“After the match, I saw [Mcmenemy] in the corridor outside the dressing rooms and he was as white as a sheet,” Taylor observes before moving swiftly on, ever unwilling to rub salt in another man’s wounds.