Sir Graham Taylor

[PeterWithesShin]

Very disappointing if we didn't.

[dave.woodhall]

bit in the mail about us not sending a club official to the funeral?

Someone on (I think) Facebook mentioned that.

Poor form if true. 

Indeed, but there's been such a massive turnover at senior level that they just might not have been recognised. But if it is true it's disgraceful.

[SoccerHQ]

"there were plenty of former villa players and staff in attendence, plus the six current personnel from taylor's time, but nobody from villa's executive. a spokesman said the owner was abroad, the chief executive didn't know taylor and the company secretary, who was keen to go, was caught up in the aftermath of transfer deadline day."

[saunders_heroes]

I was wondering why there were no mentions of Villa in the press after the funeral. Pat Murphy was quick to praise Watford FC after the funeral but nothing about us. Can't believe we could be as crass not to send an official representative to one of the club's best ever managers. Very disappointing.

[dave.woodhall]

I suppose they could say they sent employees who knew him rather than a director who didn't.

[Ian.]

Surely a funeral is a very personal affair and it warrants only people who knew the great man?

I would feel very uncomfortable attending a funeral to someone I didn't know. I expect many former people connected to our club were there and surely that's all that matters.

[OzVilla]

But then they'd surely have gone in a personal capacity. 

Someone representing Aston Villa Football Club from the Owner right through to the supporters should have been in attendance to represent the entire club IMO.

I'm surprised as we rarely get these things wrong but if there as no representation then we did, and did on a day it really did matter to many of us.

[john e]

did Doug not go,
 
I know he's old and ill but i'm sure he still gets to matches

[TheMalandro]

Surely a funeral is a very personal affair and it warrants only people who knew the great man?

I would feel very uncomfortable attending a funeral to someone I didn't know. I expect many former people connected to our club were there and surely that's all that matters.

My take on it. Plenty of Villa there. The club has did a great tribute on matchday.

[dave shelley]

did Doug not go,
 
I know he's old and ill but i'm sure he still gets to matches

As much as I dislike the old git, I don't hold it against him for not going.  If anyone heard him when Jim White tried to get his opinion on SGT after his passing, it's as well he didn't go, and I mean no disrespect by that.  It's the only time I've felt sorry for him.

[Tony Erdington]

Surely a funeral is a very personal affair and it warrants only people who knew the great man?

I would feel very uncomfortable attending a funeral to someone I didn't know. I expect many former people connected to our club were there and surely that's all that matters.

My take on it. Plenty of Villa there. The club has did a great tribute on matchday.

Did anyone meet Mrs Taylor in the car park when she arrived, and wasn't sure where she was meant go. poor form really.

[dave.woodhall]

I think a few of the tributes paid in the current H&V need a wider audience:


there was only one…

When news of Graham Taylor’s death broke I wrote a story for www.thebirminghampress.net and published it on the H&V messageboard under the heading “The piece I never wanted to write.” A few people replied by saying that it was the piece they never wanted to read, and that response was typical of the reaction throughout football when the news broke.

It’s hard to think of many times when there has been such widespread, deep and sincere mourning of a football figure. The closest comparison was Bobby Robson, and that’s a fair one because both men suffered incredible amounts of media hostility to emerge on the other side with their dignity intact an d become respected elder statesmen of the game.

I don’t need to repeat Sir Graham’s achievements during his time at Villa because they’re well known and I’m sure they will be given full coverage elsewhere in these pages. Suffice to say that he was the most influential figure at the club since Ron Saunders. Other managers won trophies, equalled his league achievements and had their team playing better football, but none of them could have done so without the almost-miraculous three year period that began when Graham Taylor inherited his shambles.   

Could Ron Atkinson have put together his team without the money that came in from David

Platt? Would Brian Little’s side have been anywhere near as good without Dwight Yorke? Would any Villa manager from then on have been as effective had we missed out on the opening years of the Premier League cash bonanza? And how much poorer would the club have been without the God-like genius of Paul McGrath? We owe all of that to Graham Taylor.

When he arrived we were at what proved to be the end of a decline unparalleled in English football history, from European champions to the second division in five years. At the time, though, it didn’t seem the end. In fact, going straight through the divisions seemed more of a possibility than getting back up. Any ordinary manager wouldn’t have touched the job with a bargepole but Graham Taylor jumped at the chance to put the resurrection of a fallen giant on the CV that would lead him to the England job.

To give just one example of the situation he inherited, Villa had 23 professionals on the books when he joined. Fifteen of them were either out of contract, in the last year of their contract, or injured. No wonder Villa were regarded as unmanageable. 

We might have been feeling sorry for ourselves but the new manager made sure that such feelings didn’t get in his way. As he put it, a shambles became a mess and although results were mixed in the first weeks of the season they soon improved on the back of record-breaking away form. It was fun to watch the Villa again and although there were a few times when it seemed that the revival was coming to an end, the fun never stopped, culminating in the best away trip ever – the 3-3 draw at Everton that marked the manager’s final game in  charge. Even though the most unlikely of title challenges had been lost the previous week, everyone who set out for Goodison knew it was going to be a special day, and it was, from the game itself to the send-off that the manager received. That was the respect in which he was held.

Twelve years later came the return, further proof of the adage that you should never go back. It’s often overlooked that Graham was a director at the time, although as he said, the role had seen him visit Bodymoor Heath twice, attend a handful of board meetings and watch a few games at Villa Park. None of this would have prepared him for the maelstrom he walked into. As he put it, “In 1987 it wasn’t a split club, there was nothing there. When I returned there were splits all over the club.” If anything, this was an understatement. Alpay was as good as on strike, Juan Pablo Angel still smarting from the treatment he’d received when he first joined over a year earlier, Peter Schmeichel the recipient of a lucrative contract that meant he had to play when fit and several others, most notably David Ginola, on massive wages despite having been frozen out by John Gregory. 

Equally damaging was the situation off the pitch, with supporters in open revolt to the extent that in certain quarters anything Doug Ellis did was wrong and anyone who worked for him a stooge. There was little wonder that the team struggled throughout 2002-03 and that, sadly, Graham came in for abuse from those who either hadn’t been around during his first term or who chose to ignore it for the sake of club politics. The nadir came when he was shamefully booed after the final home game of the season against Sunderland. Here, though, came another example of his character. Lesser managers have hidden in such circumstances. Graham Taylor came onto the pitch to address his critics. 

It was no surprise that Graham resigned within days of the season ending, refusing compensation in order that he was able to speak publicly about the situation. He had always been able to sum up affairs at Villa Park succinctly and one thing he said at this time summed up perfectly the biggest problem that he and a succession of Villa managers had faced, “There are some people at the club who work for Doug Ellis rather than Aston Villa”. Of course, by this and other veiled criticisms Taylor promptly won back much of the support he had lost from Ellis’s critics and from then on he settled into the role of one of football’s wise old men. His work for the BBC won praise and he rarely mentioned the Villa, apart from the occasional comment about Doug and some justified criticism of his treatment at the hands of the Lerner regime. 

Graham’s death came as a tremendous shock, not least because he had always seemed so full of life and enthusiasm for football. It was even a surprise that he was aged 72 – to many of us he was still the young manager whose trailblazing we had been privileged to witness at first hand.

After the news broke, attention focussed on his work at Watford – unsurprisingly, because while he performed miracles for us, what he did at Vicarage Road would have been laughed out of a Roy of the Rovers scriptwriters meeting. Before his time they’d never been in the top flight and only been promoted once to the second – Walsall had a better record. But while the national focus was Watford and England, it was closer to home that most of the stories about Taylor’s personal qualities began to emerge.

It seems as though a book could be filled about the times he met people, particularly Villa supporters, and talked for as long as they wanted, about the acts of kindness he performed and the times he went out of his way to help people. He sought neither reward nor publicity, because that was the sort of man Graham Taylor was. His death was mourned not only because we were losing a man who exemplified decency, who in the words of BBC Radio’s Pat Murphy was in danger of bringing the game into repute, but also because many of us felt as though we’d lost someone close. Graham had many qualities, but perhaps his greatest was that he had the rare ability to make people who he’d never met feel as though they knew him. 

Many words have been said about him and many epitaphs written. It’s hard to pick one out, but cartoonist David Squires summed up what many of us felt, and gave another reason why grown men admitted that they wept at the news. “At a time when it feels like the world could do with a few more decent people, his loss is felt keenly”.

There’s only one Graham Taylor. There always was. There always will be.

[dave.woodhall]

                                                                              i heard the news today,
                                                                                            oh boy

 
I don’t suppose I was the only middle-aged man who was stopped in his tracks when they heard the news at work. I don’t suppose I was the only one who had to make their excuses and leave the room, either. It sounds ridiculous, crying over the death of a man you never met, you didn’t know, who probably never even knew you existed, and all because he once, many years ago, managed the football team you support.

Well, football’s like that. It’s not rational, it’s not supposed to be. It stirs the emotions like nothing else. It’s not perfect and there are some unsavoury characters involved, which is another reason why I was so upset at the death of Graham Taylor, because he seemed to have so much left to offer and because the world can’t afford to lose such a decent man.

With that in mind I started thinking about when he was our manager, some of the great games, and how often his basic decency shone through.

The first game when it seemed as though we had something going for us was when we beat league leaders Bradford 4-2 at Valley Parade. The two Grays made their debuts, Stuart scoring twice, and it seemed as though we have a team coming together. What made the win even more unlikely was that a few days earlier Bradford had won 5-0 in the Simod Cup at Villa Park. “We needed that like a hole in the head,” was the Taylor response.

The next game for the memory bank was the 2-1 at St Andrews the week before Christmas that was the perfect answer to their win at Vila Park in our first home game of the season. I don’t doubt Sir Graham would have said that beating them was no more important than anyone else, but he would have known how much it meant.

In all the great away performances that season, one trip that I remember vividly was a defeat. Losing 2-1 at Blackburn could have been a big blow but we were going to re-double our efforts while they seemed to think they’d done the hard bit. Our manager would never allow such complacency. I also liked the comment from David Platt. I think it was his first away game since his move from Crewe and he said we’d had more fans there than he’d ever seen at Gresty Road. 

Then, the  final week of the season. Bradford at home on Bank Holiday Monday. The biggest crowd of the season and an atmosphere such as I’ve rarely known at Villa Park. It wasn’t just that this was a big occasion. All season there’d been a bond between fans and the players. The whole season was summed up in these ninety minutes. As Platt again put it, “We came onto the pitch, looked at the crowd and there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have died for Aston Villa”.   

Bradford came up against an unstoppable force of nature. I can think of a handful of occasions when it’s happened – Bournemouth in the third, Liverpool 1981, the first Inter game, Tranmere, Albion in the FA Cup. When Villa Park is like that we’re unbeatable, and Graham Taylor made it that way for the first time in years. Maybe that’s why we were could finish the job off five days later. The force that beat Bradford continued at the County Ground, Swindon,  where we got a result as lesser teams failed. To witness him being carried around the pitch was to see that an unbreakable bond had been formed. Refusing a civic reception because “finishing second is nothing to celebrate” was further proof that we not only had a great manager, we had a great man. 

In 1988-89 we didn’t really expect to take the first division by storm and there wasn’t much to shout about but once again a few days provided the highlight of the season. On November 5th what’s been called as anything up to a hundred thousand on the Nicholl/Old Trafford scale but was probably around 8,000 travelled to see us draw 1-1 with Manchester United, our equaliser scored by the returning Gordon Cowans. One man, though, was missing. Our manager was attending his daughter’s graduation. I can imagine the reaction if it happened now, but that gesture summed him up. He knew his priorities.

The other game was four days later, when we beat Blues 6-0 in the Simod Cup, in front of a crowd that wasn’t much bigger than the number we’d taken to Old Trafford. I know it was a bit like kicking a puppy, but it was fun. “I wish it could have ended at half-time” was the Taylor response, although whether that was out of sympathy for the opposition or because it was cold and he was bored, he didn’t say.

Then came the FA Cup tie at Crewe, when the manager came out with his second most famous quote, when we were two-nil down at half-time. “You got yourselves into this mess, you get yourselves out of it.” They did, 3-2.

We overlook the fact that Sir Graham came in for some criticism at this time, as he did at the start of 1989-90. But, he stuck to his guns and no-one can say he didn’t do the right thing. In particular, he did what few Villa managers have ever done in knowing when to sell a player. His signings are legendary, but just as important was getting the money to pay for them by off-loading Alan McInally to Bayern Munich. £1.1 million for a player who cost £225,000 and gave half a season’s good service was one of the best bits of business a Villa manager has ever done. 

And so on to 1989-90. A poor start, then we clicked into gear with a couple of good results including a win at Maine Road which if I remember correctly was one of those odd TV games in the days when television was first working out what to do with football and was only shown in the Midlands and north-west.

We’d won four straight league games when we played Everton on Bonfire Night, again on TV. It’s another game that will be remembered for many years and it showed the world that Graham Taylor’s collection of promising youngsters, journeymen and oddities was ready to take on all-comers. 46 points from eighteen games and an unprecedented three consecutive Manager of the Month awards was further proof.
Possibly the best Christmas of all time – 3-0 against Manchester United on Boxing Day (and God bless West Midlands Finest for making that one a 12 o’clock kick-off because so much enjoyment couldn’t happen later in the day, or something), Fergie on the dole, thank you very much for Paul McGrath and the tenth goal of the season for David Platt. 2-1 against Arsenal before a New Year’s Day masterclass , 3-0 at Chelsea with Tony Daley running half the length of the pitch to score a magnificent solo goal. We took thousands to stand on the eyesore that was the away end at Stamford Bridge and I couldn’t help but think of the times a handful of us had turned up at such places to see a mid-eighties capitulation.   

Then came the best performance of Sir Graham’s Villa career, the 2-0 win at White Hart Lane that made us think the unthinkable. David Platt and Gordon Cowans owned the pitch while Ian Ormondroyd looked every one of his many inches a world-class performer. He, and the rest of the team, reached heights that night that they never would again.

When you’re at the top there’s only one direction to travel, and maybe Villa did look down and froze.  Liverpool came up with the sort of run that separates champions from the rest and unfortunately Tony Cascarino wasn’t to prove the last great signing. The goals dried up and all that was left was that last day at Goodison, when the Gods looked kindly on us to provide good weather and a marvellous game of football while we sang, shouted, clapped, roared and showed our appreciation of the man who had given us so much in such a short time.   

I’d rather not talk about his return, as the Villa job was as impossible then as in 1987, and I don’t think Graham wanted to spend his time fire-fighting any more. Some of the work he did, such as bringing in a welfare officer and ensuring Bodymoor was upgraded, showed he was probably more concerned with overall club matters than with what happened on the pitch and a director of football role would have suited him better. It’s a period best forgotten for many reasons, and should never detract from the many great things that were done by a truly great man.

Mark Richards

[dave.woodhall]

random thoughts
 

Some from the H&V website, others that didn’t fit in anywhere else.

I was having lunch in the mac café in Cannon Hill Park over the road from Edgbaston when I heard the sad news. Graham Taylor was a Warwickshire member and loved cricket.

As I was trying to take it all in a couple of Warwickshire lads came in and sat at the table next to me. I guess they were in their early twenties, second teamers maybe, doing pre-season gym work and maybe nets on a cold January day.

There were a couple of empty seats at their table. I wondered “What if?” What if Graham had walked in, I had gone to chat with him, and I had suggested we go and join them? I reckon he would have done it gladly.

At that age they might or might not have known much about him. But about this I am sure. He would have been understanding with his time with them. And they would have been captivated. Whether they chatted cricket or football – they would have learned a lot from him. And he would have made sure they knew, if they didn’t know already, how lucky they were to be earning a living playing the game.

Graham Taylor was a real old-fashioned football man. And a very fine club manager, in the true sense of the word.

Charles Ross.
The writer was editor of Wolves fanzine A Load of Bull.

I don’t suppose anything I could say will be original. Better writers than I have written thousands of words, people who knew him have made some wonderfully touching tributes. The wave of public affection is something I’ve never known before.

I can understand why Villa, Watford and Lincoln supporters feel how they do. He performed miracles at all three clubs. It took me a while to understand why everyone else in football felt the same. The reason, when you stop to think, is quite simple. He was a decent man. He exemplified all that was good in people, and how you wished you could behave yourself.

Sir Graham used his fame for good purpose. He was involved with charitable causes but more than that, he knew he was in a position where he could make people feel better. The things he did and the time he spent with, it seems, anyone who asked him, showed that he was a special man indeed. He rarely did them publicly and most have only come to light since his death.

The most important thing he did, though, was in the public eye. He suffered the most appalling abuse at the hands of the media and far from becoming bitter, he survived it and went on to beat them at their own game. Graham Taylor the broadcaster was mourned almost as much as Graham Taylor the manager. Does anyone even remember the name of the lowlife who thought up that headline?

Sir Graham showed dignity. He never stopped respecting the people who paid his wages and allowed him to enjoy a career doing what he loved. In return we showed him the respect that he deserved. There’s been talk of statutes, and of a stand named after him at Villa Park to match the one at Vicarage Road. Sir Graham has a much greater legacy than that. Whenever you hear his name, you can’t help but smile. That’s a legacy. 

Mac McColgan

“This place is a shambles.”
Winning 4-2 up at Bradford – the first sign we were on our way.
Small Heath 1 Villa 2 – Happy Christmas to you.
David Platt.
Bradford at home and an atmosphere that said “We’re back”.
Getting promoted at Swindon.
Alan McInally.
8,000 of us at Old Trafford but one man missing because he had his priorities right.
Villa 13 Small Heath 0.
Dwight Yorke.
6-2 against Everton on Bonfire Night with the country noticing us for the first time.
Boxing Day 1989 – “Thank you very much for Paul McGrath” and “Fergie on the dole”.
Chelsea 0 Villa 3. Tony Daley’s finest hour. 
Spurs 0 Villa 2 and daring to dream.
Goodison and the best day out ever.
The reception when he came back with Watford.
Being the only man at Villa Park with any dignity on the night we sunk to their level.
Going on the pitch after the last match of the season when lesser men would have hidden.
Villa 2 Manchester United 2 in 2010-11 and listening to his pride in watching a patched-up Villa team matched the Stretford billionaires. No BBC neutrality that day.

Paul Turner

[West Derby Villan]

Thanks Dave