Taylor revisits Rotterdam horror

Published on Friday 10 October 2008 23:24

An Impossible Job (ITV 4, Tuesday)

ALTHOUGH he struggled with the tactical intricacies of international football, Graham Taylor appears to have achieved complete mastery of Einsteinian physics. How else to explain that for the past decade and a half he has been travelling backward in time, getting younger by the year?

That, at least, was the impression gained from the updated documentary An Impossible Job, which looked at Taylor's doomed attempt as England manager to take his team to the 1994 World Cup finals. The bulk of the original programme remained, but was bookended by footage of the man as he is today, reflecting on that traumatic time in his life.

As well as looking younger now, in his mid-60s, than he did when a mere half-centenarian, he also appeared more insightful, more intelligent and more human too. Not that he was anything like a monster back then, but there was certainly a period when he came across as more of a caricature than an actual person.

Part Alan Partridge, part Tony Hancock, and part Norman Wisdom, Taylor ended up as the archetypal little British man, futilely shaking his fist at the heavens, railing against fate and grumbling about the authorities. "Referee! Referee!" he squawked in the match against Poland in May 1993, running out of the technical area to demand a penalty, arms raised as if he were in reality chasing after a bus that had failed to stop.

He didn't get the penalty and he didn't get the result he was after either. In fact, from that point onwards, there was little about his job that Taylor did get.

Some people respond well to a degree of pressure, but beyond a certain point it stupefies us all, and long before his tenure ended there was nothing left to suggest how or why Taylor had managed to convince anyone he had been the right person for the job in the first place. And that, of course, was one of the lessons of the documentary. The job of running the England football team brought such pressure with it that you may well have to be something akin to a football genius – and enjoy some luck as well – to make a decent fist of it.

Taylor, for all that he had flourished at club level with a fast and physical style of play, was far from being a footballing genius. What is more, he enjoyed hardly any good fortune when it mattered.

It did not help that his most gifted player, Paul Gascoigne, was also his most troubled. At one point we saw Gazza run on to the pitch clutching his protective Phantom of the Opera-style mask (after needing to be reminded to wear it). At another, we heard him chirp and twitter expletives from the sidelines as a TV reporter tried to do a piece to camera. Not the easiest of players to deal with, then, even if he was blessed with rare talent.

Gascoigne's waywardness was only one of the factors that Taylor could not rein in, and by the end it seemed he could do almost nothing right. The football public were running out of patience, the media had long ago given him up as a hopeless case, and he was doing little more than waiting for the end.

Officially, there was still hope as England went into their last qualifying match in San Marino, but it was extinguished within ten seconds as the home side took a shock lead. The end for Taylor came six days later.

Since the programme was originally shown, England have slowly come to grips with the difficulties of the post. Some of them were discussed the following night in a follow-up show called England Expects, but we got a Gaelic programme instead. Anyway, what has become clear is that the job demands big, extremely self-assured personalities, men who are cunning or at least highly intelligent both on and off the pitch. Taylor simply did not fit the bill.

Of course, the fact that he had a catch phrase made him all the more comedic. "Do I not like that?" he said, when something happened that he clearly did not like, so asking a question about it appeared particularly inane.

So too, mind you, did Taylor's assistant Phil Neal, the former Liverpool player who was seen in the original programme doing little more than aping his superior's gestures and saying "Yes boss" at regular intervals.

Fortunately, Neal's more fawning moments were edited out of the new version. Unfortunately, this made it appear that his "contribution" to the cause consisted merely of sitting, silently, on a bench.