WATFORD’S REAL ROCKET MAN
A remarkable, brave coach but England was a step too far
WHEN Dave Clement retired, some bright spark thought it would be an idea to get Graham Taylor to autograph a framed copy of his most famous work.
Clement was the journalist who, in a moment of inspiration, had come up with the headline ‘Swedes 2 Turnips 1’ to encapsulate England’s defeat by Sweden at the 1992 European Championship.
He didn’t create the image the following day, depicting Taylor as half man, half root vegetable, but that headline became Taylor’s epitaph as England manager.
When the idea of signing was put to Graham, he wasn’t angry, or abusive. He just declined, politely. He was a nice man, Graham Taylor; but he wasn’t a mug.
So it was a pity that his brief spell as England manager — little over three years, from 1990 to 1993 — came to define him, because take that away and Taylor would be remembered as one of the most remarkable domestic coaches in the modern game. Empowered by Elton John’s wealth, faith and benevolence, he built Watford as a successful club, taking them through four divisions in five years, and finishing runners-up to Liverpool in their debut season in the old First Division, 1982-83.
He came second to Liverpool again in 1989-90 with Aston Villa, having also brought them up from the Second Division. He discovered and promoted John Barnes, turned Luther Blissett into a striker worthy of the attention of AC Milan and played 4-2-4 and a high press at a time when much of English football was mired in caution.
It was only when he was elevated to the role of England manager, ahead of people’s favourites such as Brian Clough and Terry Venables, that Taylor floundered.
Although, in his defence, he also had rotten luck. Kjetil Rekdal has a decent goalscoring record for Norway, but it is unlikely he ever scored one like the screamer against England on October 14, 1992, to start Taylor’s World Cup qualifying campaign with a 1-1 draw.
From there, the campaign went from bad to worse. Taylor lost key players, including Alan Shearer, to injury, and compounded these weaknesses with confusing tactical experiments.
One saw Gary Pallister deployed as a left back to combat Norway’s height, another put Carlton Palmer in the team away to Holland. He was unwisely critical of the players after a poor performance during a 1-1 draw in Poland, which caused a rift in the camp.
And to make matters worse, the whole debacle was captured in a documentary he hoped would record his glory. It was supposed to be called Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job — and witness Taylor proving that it wasn’t. It instead became known as Do I Not
Like That, after one of Taylor’s touchline outbursts as his best plans unravelled, and England crashed out of the competition at the qualifying stage.
TAYLOR’S
background was not that of an international footballer, or even an international coach, and it sometimes seemed as if this got the better of him with England. He was a player with Grimsby Town and Lincoln City, a manager who had risen through the ranks, who had never won a major trophy or been appointed by a top division club and, on occasions, he appeared motivated to prove his smartness. He dropped Pau l Gascoigne for Gordon Cowans in a game against Ireland, gave Crystal Palace midfielder Andy Gray his debut in a crucial qualifier with Poland and substituted Gary Lineker in what was to be his last international appearance, with England chasing a goal to stay in the European Championship.
‘You’re obviously a very brave manager,’ one journalist tells Taylor on film, as he seeks to justify another controversial selection: and, in many ways, he was.
Despite his failure with England, some of the actions that drew most criticism may be viewed more benignly with historical distance. Yes, he took off Lineker. But how many times have England’s followers howled in anger when a manager has appeared in thrall to a misfiring superstar, such as Wayne Rooney or David Beckham? Yes, he lost his cool as England suffered; but wasn’t Sven Goran Eriksson distrusted for his lack of passion?
And Taylor did get one thing right. In 1993, when Gascoigne was the most influential player in the English game, Taylor was bold enough to identify his drinking as a problem, and say so publicly.
Whether he should have brought the matter into the open, on the eve of a match with Norway — which England lost — is another matter. But Gascoigne has had many facilitators throughout his life, and not enough contemporaries who made a stand. Taylor did, with his talk of Gascoigne’s refuelling habits, just as he confronted Elton John, his chairman at Watford, about his drinking a decade earlier by presenting him with a pint of beer for breakfast at his house.
‘You had better have that because you need alcohol to get going every day, don’t you?’ Taylor told him.
‘He was like a brother to me,’ Elton John’s statement began yesterday, and Taylor was equally honest and determined later in his career, when faced with the heavy- drinking Paul McGrath at Aston Villa.
He managed other clubs after the World Cup experience — Wolves, Watford, whom he took into the Premier League, and where a stand was named in his honour in 2014, and Aston Villa — but his professional standing was damaged by England.
Football was changing, too. Sitting in the press room as a summariser for BBC Radio, he told me that he found players far less receptive to coaching ideas now than when he first came into the game. He recalled how he drilled the Watford team, many of them young players coming through the ranks, until they were a match for the best of their day. He said players didn’t seem interested now. Yet he never lost that love for the game, or his level-headed insight, considering the extremes of emotion it had unleashed around him.
‘In this job you get nice things said about you, and bad things said about you,’ he told an interviewer in 2002. ‘The trick is not to spend any longer thinking about one than the other. In the end, they are both b******s.’
Alongside brilliant contemporaries such as Bob Paisley, Taylor has a room named after him at the Football Association’s coaching headquarters, St George’s Park. He would, at least, like that.