Warm, charming, human, fallible and brave – Graham Taylor was a football man with the game buried deep in his bones

John Dillon13 January 2017

It can be difficult to grasp what is meant by the much-used term “a football man”. But if you knew Graham Taylor, you understood exactly. You knew it meant that the game was buried deep in his bones and in his soul. And what was in there, he gave back to it with all his being.

Just as you also knew that he was a gentleman, a real gentleman as well.

He was Passionate. Endlessly passionate. Talkative. Endlessly talkative. Knowledgeable. Experienced. Warm. Charming. Human. Fallible. Brave. And revolutionary, whether you agreed or not with the tactics by which he hoisted Watford from the old Fourth Division to the First Division within five tumultuous years. This was a truly remarkable football adventure story. It is the achievement which marks him out most of all as a football Man of The People.

In 2016, the world mourned the deaths of so many notable people. And, with great shock and sadness, football begins the new year in the same way, mourning the passing at the age of 72 of the former England manager, who recovered so well from the brutal failure of his time in charge of the national team to become something of a national treasure.

If any man reached the very top of the game yet remained so firmly in touch with its folk roots and with his own engaging and enthusiastic personality, it was Taylor. As well as a great football man, he was a nice man. An unfailingly courteous man. It’s as simple as that.

There were those, of course, who disliked the long-ball tactics he utilised at Watford. And much of the criticism he faced as England boss came because of an apparent unwillingness to let creative players have their heads. None of this meant, in any way, that it made him less of a “football man.” He was far too besotted by it for that. But he wanted to win, which is the mark of the football man, too.

It is probably the greatest tribute to his personality to underline the way he reacted to the bitterly disappointing and savagely reported downfall of his England regime in 1993 after the failure to qualify for the following year’s World Cup.

Graham Taylor | 1944-2017

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Within six months of his resignation from that impossible job – it comes with a toxic track-suit to summon up a memorable phrase coined by a colleague – he was back in management at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

That said so much about the boundless strength and depth of his character and his unrequited love of football and the drug of management.

A lesser man might have shrunk away from the game because things had gone so badly wrong with England when he had been so desperate to succeed. And because the treatment he received from the media during that time was pitiless, sometimes in the extreme. Yes, Fleet Street was a tougher place in those days and the back pages were more vicious. And he had not been a popular manager with the public, either.

Taylor came back, though, not only to be a manager at Watford again and then for a second spell at Aston Villa after he left Wolves. But also as a much-respected, massively enthusiastic and informative pundit.

Through it all, too, he kept and nurtured a love of sports journalism and some very close and good relationships with journalists, whom he respected and admired despite some of the headlines he had been forced to endure.

Photo: Rex

The most famous of these was The Sun’s “Swedes 2 Turnips 1” summary of a defeat at the 1992 European Championships.

It must have been painful. Just as the fall-out to the TV documentary charting the failure of the World Cup qualifying campaign in 1993 must have been, as well, when it was broadcast to huge publicity the following year. But you guessed always that Taylor knew that in the end, this all came with the job.

His father, Tom, had been a sports journalist in the family’s adopted home town of Scunthorpe. I recall the pride of both father and son when, while working at The People, I was involved in a feature in which Tom went to Wembley to cover the England side led by his son.

On a personal note, after a family tragedy, Taylor was hugely supportive, warm and sympathetic.

Just as I was also hugely impressed by his unsolicited but deeply felt public condemnation of a round of redundancies and spending cuts which hit another national newspaper where he and I had been fellow columnists.

True enough, it seemed that the England job had bewildered him by the time his tenure came to its dismal end. But he’s not alone in that, is he? It’s done the same to nearly every incumbent since.

Photo: Owen Humphrey/Pooll/Getty Images
Owen Humphrey/Pooll/Getty Images

Taylor came back, though. And from the depths of public humiliation, he became a much-admired man again.

He is a true loss and will be sadly missed by the game he loved so profoundly and by the supporters and followers who became so fond of him.

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