Watford legend Graham Taylor reflects on the incredible journey which might not have happened had it not been for a former England manager

Taylor went on to become one of the greatest managers of his era. His achievements are unlikely to be matched again in English football and the fact many football fans think of disgraceful front pages on national newspapers when they hear Taylor’s name is a tragedy.

The idea of a club like Stevenage, for example, going from League Two to finishing second in the Premier League and qualifying for the Champions League in the space of just six seasons is ridiculous. That is effectively what Taylor achieved with the Golden Boys. At the same time he created the country’s first ‘family club’ and cultivated a relationship with the community which still reaps the benefits now, 37 years after he took over the club.

Football has undoubtedly changed and the sums of money now circulating in the game would make such achievements almost impossible, but that should in no way diminish what was a real-life Roy of the Rovers story.

Tomorrow more than a dozen players from both of Taylor’s spells at the club, members of his coaching staff and his family will join him as the club renames the Rous Stand after the great man.

A humbled Taylor said: “I feel very honoured because in this day and age, if you name a stand after somebody then usually it is because they have paid for that right. To get a stand named after you now is so unusual. The other side of it is that if an individual does have a stand named after them, then usually they have died. So I do really feel honoured. This was the last thing I expected because of the years that have gone by.

“It brings back the memories of ten years that were probably the happiest of my footballing career. I don’t want to be disrespectful to the club or the town itself but it is not a big club or a big town but now when you look at it, people think of it being a Championship side automatically.

“When I look back I have to smile because it was a Fourth Division club with a greyhound track around the pitch. That is what it was. If you look at it now – a Championship club with ambitions of reaching the Premier League – compared to what it was, then it is incredible really.”

Taylor was speaking on Wednesday at The Belfry Hotel not far from his Midlands home. For those who have had the pleasure to spend time with the 70-year-old, they will tell you how easy it is to get lost in conversation. The thoroughly enjoyable hours flew by.

The start of his Watford story

A playing career which included spells at Grimsby Town and Lincoln City ended prematurely for Taylor at the age of 28. He quickly developed a reputation as a talented manager, guiding Lincoln to the Fourth Division title in 1976, four years after taking the top job.

A year later superstar Sir Elton John, who grew up in Pinner and was already on the Watford board, became the club’s chairman and started looking for a replacement for Mike Keen.

England’s World Cup-winning captain Moore was in the final stages of his playing career and held talks with Elton over the position. Moore says he “shook hands” with Elton after agreeing to take over and was stunned to read in the newspaper three weeks later that the position had been given to the lesser-known Taylor.

Taylor continued the events, saying: “Prior to Elton and I meeting for the first time, he had spoken to [England manager] Don Revie and Revie told him there is a young boy, a young manager at Lincoln, called Graham Taylor. Prior to that, [Watford directors] Geoff Smith and Muir Stratford had also recommended me to Elton.

“Elton was interested in offering the job to Bobby Moore but the directors argued that Bobby had not played or managed in the Fourth Division.

“So when I got home from work one day, Rita told me Don Revie had called and would be ringing back at 5pm. Well when he said a football chairman had been on the phone to him and that he had recommended me for a job, I thought ‘right great’. When he said it was Elton John and that club was Watford – a team in the Fourth Division and Lincoln had just been promoted to the Third Division – well my assessment of Don Revie at that time plummeted and I said ‘what are you talking about?’.

“I told Don that I had just signed a new three-year contract but mentioned it had a clause which said Lincoln could only allow me to leave if that club paid £20,000 and this was in 1977. When Elton phoned me and I said about the contract and clause, he just said don’t worry about that.”

But things still could have turned out so differently for Watford and Taylor. He was approached to take over West Bromwich Albion in the First Division (now Premier League) at the annual Football League awards the night before Taylor was due to meet Elton. However, a comment made by the Baggies chairman Bert Millichip aimed at enticing the highly-rated manager, did the complete opposite.

Taylor explained: “He said to me ‘you have never played in the First Division, you have never managed in the First Division, but we know all about you’. And I was thinking ‘well everybody knows about me, I have played in the Football League after all. I was totally put off.”

Coming from Scunthorpe, Taylor had a soft-spot for the underdog and believes his background played a big part in his decision to turn down the chance of breaking into First Division football for the first time in favour of dropping down a league.

So Taylor met Elton the following day as planned and was surprised, and slightly confused, by the superstar’s demeanour.

“I said to him ‘why are you so excited?’” Taylor recalled: “Elton replied with ‘would you believe it but this is the first thing I have done on my own. I usually have agents and people doing the negotiations and things like this. This has always been my club and now I am the chairman. I’m so excited because the England manager has recommended you and I want to sign you.

“I was brought up in Scunthorpe, had played for Grimsby and Lincoln and here he was offering me a five-year contract. I said ‘what do you expect from me [in those five years]?’ He responded with ‘I want to be playing in Europe’. I mean he actually said that. I thought, blimey this bloke is not right in the head. I said ‘and how much do you think that will cost, to get from the middle of the Fourth Division to the top of the First Division in five years?’ He replied with ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’ It was 1977 and I thought right, well this will frighten him off; I said ‘you won’t get any change out a million pounds.’ Elton replied with ‘right, let’s give it a go.’"

It may have taken him an extra year, but that is exactly what the duo achieved together.

“When we got into the First Division, when you added up the signings we had made against the players we sold, our deficit was just over £750,000. Every now and then I tell Elton he still owes me £250,000. He tells me in his chosen words to p*** off,” Taylor said, laughing.

Creating a ‘real community’

Taylor’s first decade in charge of Watford between 1977 and 1987 is a period of time that many fans look back on as one of the happiest moments of their lives.

The impact he had on the club’s supporters and the town as a whole is hard to quantify. One of the main reasons that period was so special for the fans was the togetherness created by the club’s community work, at a time when hooliganism plagued English football.

“One of the things I’m most proud of is making Watford the first community club,” Taylor said. “Whatever anyone says, I know we were doing things that no other club was. We created a real community.

“I wanted to say to people that we are your club. You pay to come to watch us on a Saturday so we will come to see you at your work place, free of charge.

“It went down so well because the players were first class at it...Not one player during my time at the club, in both spells, refused to sign for us because of it.

“What we did was then followed by a lot of clubs. I take pride in that.”

The Hornets wanted to put the community work into the players’ contracts but the Professional Footballers’ Association refused to allow it, even though the players were on board, so the club got around it by adding it to the players’ incentive scheme.

He praised the role of his coaching staff and players during the hugely successful period but was also keen to highlight the important work of office staff like Ann Swanson, who looked after the Family Stand, and marketing manager Caroline Gillies, who Taylor believes “never received the credit she deserves for the community development of the club”.

Breaking the mould

The Hornets were breaking the mould off the field and also on it. They had developed a style of play which resulted in a lot of goals but also criticism from sections of the media.

“We were wrongly accused of playing long ball,” Taylor stated passionately. “We got the ball forward quickly, no doubt about that, but people thought we just bombed it forward and the Watford fans know differently.

“Nowadays you get two centre backs in their own half, 30 yards from their own goal, ten yards apart, and passing it to each other with no one pressing them. If people want that kind of football then great, I don’t.

“If I went back in the game now, I would be demanding that we pressed those players because winning the ball back in the opposition’s defensive third creates so many scoring opportunities.

“I understand why they don’t do it because you want to drop off and limit the chances the opponent can create but what about the people watching the game? You could pull fans out of the crowd and they could do what you are doing.

“You speak to any Watford player and we worked on team play. Steve Harrison would take the defensive training because he was excellent at it and on Friday it would be light work or working on restarts. Why? Because you score from restarts.

“We tried to put the ball in the goalscoring area (an arcing area of around five or six yards from the six-yard box) because I think around 92 per cent of goals were scored in that part of the pitch. So you must get the ball in that part of the pitch to have a chance to score. Yes if someone scores by putting it in the top corner from outside the area then we say ‘that is a great goal’ but that is because it is not usually where goals are scored from.”

The pinnacle of Taylor’s time at Watford was arguably reaching the 1984 FA Cup final. He acknowledged a few players struggled to perform that day and has still not watched the game back 30 years on, despite having a video cassette of the contest in his house throughout that time.

Everton’s Andy Gray became a villain among Hornets fans for the challenge on Steve Sherwood which resulted in Everton’s second goal. But Taylor doesn’t hold any grudges against the former Sky Sports pundit, accepting he would have expected George Reilly to make the same challenge had it been at the other end.

Taylor was to remain at Vicarage Road for a further three years but his decision that it was time to move on was prompted by the Thursday night game with Coventry City on April 30, the fourth final fixture of the season. The 3-2 defeat was watched by just 11,590 fans and Taylor was left questioning whether a mid-table finish in the top flight of the First Division was now considered a given among supporters despite the hard work that was being put in by the staff and players. Whilst considering his future, Taylor was approached by Aston Villa and the 42-year-old decided to drop down a division once again for a new challenge. Taylor says Elton also understood it was the right time to leave.

Promotion and a second-place finish in the First Division during his three years at Villa Park landed Taylor the England job; one he accepts didn’t go well and one which resulted in ridicule following failure to qualify for the World Cup, national newspaper headlines and an unflattering documentary.

He spent a year at Wolverhampton Wanderers before returning to Vicarage Road, initially as general manager before replacing Kenny Jackett as boss a year later.

Taylor secured successive promotions back to the Premier League but admitted that off the field his second spell “wasn’t the same”. He endured his only relegation in management at the end of the Hornets’ first season in the top flight and after a superb start to the following campaign, things started to go wrong and Taylor decided to retire at the end of the season, with the team finishing ninth.

He went back to Aston Villa as a non-executive director and demanded the club would not offer him the manager’s job should they sack John Gregory. But Gregory left for Derby County of his own accord in February 2002 and Villa asked Taylor to perform a U-turn over his retirement.

Taylor said: “For some Watford supporters it looked like I had gone back on my word because I had retired. Now I understand that. But some of them make out like I did that on purpose and I didn’t. What many people don’t realise is that I had that understanding from [chairman] Doug Ellis (that Taylor wouldn’t be offered the job if Gregory was sacked). It was not my intention to take over but when they offered it to me, I had not been out of the game long and I took the offer.

“But it didn’t take me long to realise that I didn’t like the way football was heading.”

Unhappy with the signs

Taylor retired once more 15 months later, following a 16th-place finish and, more importantly, a fall-out with Villa over the structure of the club’s board.

He said: “The biggest reason I left football was that I didn’t like the way it was going. I saw wealthy non-football people running football clubs. A lot of these people are very successful businessmen but what football gave them was celebrity status. There are far too many people like that and they try to run their football club like their other businesses. They want people who report directly to them, like a CEO or a finance director, and they are non-football people too.

“I would have to adapt to that and, rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t. I learned that when I went back to Aston Villa the second time.”

Taylor expanded further and went on to clarify that his comments were not aimed at Watford’s current regime, even though similar criticism has been directed at them in the past.

He continued: “At certain clubs, like those in Italy for example, they have a manager who is only in charge of the first team and nothing else. Well I’m sorry but what about the youth policy? I used to speak to people like (youth team coach) Tom Walley and people that were my staff. They weren’t the football club’s or the director’s. How Elton ran the football club is completely different to how they are run now.

“If these clubs are not successful then someone has to pay the price. And whilst that has always been the case, if you look at how long managers are staying at clubs now, you have to ask what is it all about? You need to have some sort of consistency because the players need it.

“I was given time. When we got promoted and ended up 18th in that first season [in the Second Division in 1980] I wasn’t sacked and I was given time. We finished 18th, then ninth and then we were promoted after finishing second. That wouldn’t happen today. I would have been sacked.

“The game was changing and I didn’t like it. You could argue that I wanted the power and I wouldn’t disagree with that. But if I am going to be the football manager, then I am not going to have other people recommending what players I am going to have and told what players you are going to have.

“I am not talking about Watford, I am talking about clubs in general.”

Taylor couldn’t recall the last time he watched the Hornets live and has only seen them briefly on the TV this season.

Whilst Taylor is still honourary life president of the Golden Boys, he doesn’t hold a formal position at the club and said he wasn’t in a position to comment on whether recent criticism that the club had lost its identity was fair.

‘Credit has to be given’ One thing which isn’t in any doubt is that the Pozzos and chief executive Scott Duxbury deserve praise for finally rebuilding the East Stand at Vicarage Road, which was not used by supporters for several years before being rebuilt.

“It is great. I am very, very happy about that,” Taylor said. “After growing up in a time when we saw first-hand what a restructuring of the ground did for the club, I am so pleased. Whatever you feel about the owners, credit has to be given. And I’m not just saying that because one of the stands is being named after me. You have to move the club forward as well as the team and they are doing that.”

Tomorrow the hugely-important Walley, ex-first-team coaches John Ward and Steve Harrison and more than a dozen former players from Taylor’s two spells at the club will be at the official renaming ceremony.

A grateful Taylor said: “It will be a very proud moment for me because not only will there be former players there, but I will have my family and my grandchildren there.

“They think that I’m a silly old grandad. I’m just hoping that they can see their silly old grandad who makes jokes that nobody laughs at had a career that was not too bad.”

- There will be more from Taylor’s extensive interview in next week’s Watford Observer.