In the early 1990s, English football was undergoing a revolution.
The advent of the Premier League and the riches that came with it heralded a new dawn — and ambitious Wolverhampton Wanderers wanted to be part of it.
Backed by Sir Jack Hayward’s considerable fortune, Wolves built what was, at the time, one of the country’s finest football stadiums. Hayward also set about funding a team that was fit to grace it and challenge English football’s elite. Promotion from the second tier — as soon as possible — was the only aim.
England international and flagship signing Geoff Thomas joined for big money before manager Graham Turner, who had guided Wolves up from the pit of the Fourth Division, was sacked as Hayward lost patience after four seasons in the second tier.
This scene setting isn't necessary.
In his place, to everyone’s surprise, came the most high-profile manager in the country.
Higher profile than Alex Ferguson, Kevin Keegan or Kenny Dalglish? I don't think so mate.
Graham Taylor was one of the most recognisable faces in the land. But not in a good way.
Taylor, presumably for no other reason than alliteration, was at the time known to casual football observers as ‘that turnip bloke’, after a malicious tabloid campaign to see him axed as England manager turned ugly with the use of, yes, a vegetable-based slur, that cruellest of jibes.
After Bobby Robson’s side charmed and rallied the nation in reaching the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup, English football was back on the proverbial map.
Taylor, having enjoyed great success with Watford (guiding them from the Fourth Division to runners-up in the top flight) and Villa (from the second tier to, again, First Division runners-up) was hired to continue England’s renaissance.
It didn’t go well.
They crashed out of Euro 1992 in the group stage and then miserably failed to quality for the 1994 World Cup in America. Taylor, with much of his reign captured for a new legendary TV documentary, was widely mocked and pilloried. He was a turnip.
Ever see his England teams Tim? I did. We were fucking shit. He picked laughable teams. Who fancies Lee Sharpe as a bit of a left wing back or Carlton Palmer playing over a dozen consecutive games?
His next move, despite his England failings, could easily have been to the Premier League, given his club record. Instead it was to an unfashionable, mid-table Second Division side. Wolves.
I very much doubt any PL teams would have been interested. And aren't you contradicting yourself? We're either a big spending team with tons of history in a brilliant ground or we're unfashionable. We can't be both.
So Wolves now had a top class manager (albeit one with baggage, but also a point to prove), a wonderful stadium, a passionate fanbase ready to turn out in their tens of thousands and a squad of quality players including incomparable goalscoring great Steve Bull, renowned strikers Don Goodman and David Kelly, wispy winger Steve Froggatt, Dutch international defender John De Wolf, one of English football’s rising stars in defender Dean Richards, England winger Tony Daley and the aforementioned Thomas.
He wasn't top class at all. You're jumping ahead of yourself here too, you've only got to him being appointed and you're mentioning five players that Taylor himself signed.
Yet in November 1995, Taylor left the club in a position no better than where he’d found it (technically he resigned to save face, but Taylor was effectively sacked).
He certainly hadn’t become a bad manager after his England experience. Indeed, he would go on to repeat his Watford heroics, taking them from the third tier to the top flight yet again.
He was a bad manager, or at least he disintegrated into one here. We were bloody awful.
So, what on earth went wrong at Wolves?
That 1994-95 season, Taylor’s only full campaign in charge, will go down as one of the most brilliantly bonkers in club history.
Hayward had bankrolled a giddy spending spree of £5 million split between Daley (£1.25 million), Goodman (£1.1 million) Froggatt (£1 million), De Wolf (£600,000) and Neil Emblen (£600,000) among others.
For context, the country’s biggest spenders that season were Everton at £10.9 million. Wolves spent more than Nottingham Forest, Chelsea and Manchester City — and they’d spent £4 million under Turner the year before… astronomical sums at the time.
A squad laced with quality would score more goals than anyone in the division (77) but concede 61. Notts County, who finished bottom, only let in five more.
Taylor’s gung-ho approach was fabulously entertaining — April saw three 3-3 draws in the space of six matches. When it clicked (5-0 and 5-1 victories over Southend United and Bristol City) Wolves were unstoppable. When it didn’t (a 5-1 defeat at Bolton Wanderers or 4-1 away to Oldham Athletic, for example), they were hideous.
We played shit football and had no midfield. We just had better strikers than most teams. We didn't even look that good when we beat teams handsomely.
They won seven of their first 10 and then nine in 14 after Christmas. But seven draws from the last nine games saw a promotion charge tail off for a squad ravaged by injuries. Daley and left-back Neil Masters missed almost the entire season with knee problems. Ditto Thomas. Bull sat out a third of the campaign, Froggatt was sidelined from December onwards and De Wolf missed the run-in.
“There seemed to be a curse on the place,” Thomas told The Athletic.
“Everybody we were signing ended up in the treatment room a couple of weeks after. For Graham it must have been really frustrating. It was his first opportunity after England to prove he was still a top manager and he couldn’t really ever put his best team out.”
Don't sign injury prone players then. Not much you can do about Froggatt being knacked by a terrible tackle but the club's medical staff told you not to sign Daley. De Wolf was old. Thomas got his injury way before Taylor arrived and that basically did him as a player.
Wolves stumbled into the play-offs, where they met Bolton. After winning the first-leg 2-1 at Molineux, they were cruelly beaten 2-0 after extra-time at Burnden Park, with John McGinlay scoring the winner after lamping Kelly in the face but somehow avoiding a red card (it’s still forbidden to utter McGinlay’s name for many in Wolverhampton).
“It’s a big regret for all the guys in that squad that we didn’t get over that final hurdle,” Thomas said.
Let's not have hard luck stories here. It's our own fault we didn't take our chances in the home leg.
The hangover continued into the next season when, after spending yet more money (£3 million), Taylor was sacked for overseeing a run of four wins in as many months. He also foolishly agreed to sell Bull to Coventry City (Bull would turn the move down, but in Wolverhampton that’s akin to the council replacing the pork bap joint in Princes Square with a branch of Subway — ie, utter sacrilege).
Nothing to do with a hangover. We were just wank. We played appalling football. Any chance of you mentioning him signing Eric fucking Young and playing him every single game? A terrible footballer.
At the time the binning of Taylor was seen by an impatient fanbase to be the right decision. Indeed, there had been protests calling for the sacking after the 0-0 draw at home to Charlton Athletic that proved to be his last match.
Impatience? Fuck off man. We were diabolical. We were in the bottom six as well.
But Taylor’s success in the following years — and Wolves’ miserable failure to become a top-flight force until, well, now — has seen history rewritten somewhat. It’s generally thought that such a top-level, forward-thinking boss (Taylor instigated a youth academy and set the foundations for a new training ground) should have been given more time.
Yeah, how visionary of him. I think we'd have done it anyway, don't you?
“Sacking him at the time was one of the biggest mistakes a Wolves board have made,” Goodman said. “You only have to look at what he did afterwards at Watford, going from League One to the Premier League.
Shut up Don.
“I found there was an undercurrent, particularly from the national media, from his England time that there was a wish to see him fail, so they could jump on him. He was a villain to the media and it felt like that at the time. I think that contributed to the supporters jumping on Graham when we lost in the play-offs and didn’t start well the following season.
“We should have won promotion. For a squad that was so talented, unquestionably for me the best in the league at the time, ultimately we fell short. He had put everything in place and we fell at the final hurdle.
“We played Charlton at home, it finished 0-0. I remember hitting the bar with the last effort of the game and I always wondered what the future would have been had that ball found the back of the net. It may have bought him some time and who knows what could have happened.”
Shut up Don.
We weren't second, remember. We were 4th. So two other teams deserved to go up ahead of us. That's how leagues work.
Ah yes, Charlton at home.
In the matchday programme for that game, Hayward, never one to wear his heart anywhere but on his sleeve, wrote the following: “Why have I spent the last five years putting this club before my young family? Why have I put this club before my health? Have I got the guts to make hard decisions? Have I got the vision to make the right decisions?”
You don’t read programme notes like that any more.
Because no-one buys programmes any more.
Taylor wasn’t one to mince his words either.
“We lack players who have the mental toughness and the ability to handle the crowd’s expectation,” he had earlier said of his squad.
When he resigned, knowing the sack was imminent, Taylor bravely faced the media — again not something you tend to see in 2019. “I am sad, because this has as much to do with matters off the pitch as those on it,” he said.
Well, he was talking wank, wasn't he? What matters?
Wolves goalscoring legend John Richards joined the board as a director a few months after Taylor was appointed.
He feels Taylor was the right man at the wrong club.
“There was frustration because Sir Jack had invested a lot of money into the club and the team,” Richards, who netted 194 times for the club and would later become managing director, said. “They felt there was sufficient quality in the squad to get automatic promotion. When that didn’t happen there was a feeling Graham wasn’t necessarily the right man to get that team up.
“It was a frustrating period for everybody. Sometimes it doesn’t click, managers can be successful at one club but not another. It didn’t click for Graham.
“From Sir Jack’s point of view in particular, he wanted a quick return on his investment. The expectations suddenly shot a lot higher, not just from the fans but also with the directors, so the disappointment of failure was felt harder. We assumed it was a match made in heaven with a manager of that calibre. There was a lot of focus on the club given Graham’s profile.
“If we’d gone up then, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have stayed there. It was a missed opportunity. You’re looking at it being since the early 1980s in my time when they were last secure in the top flight — it’s been a long time coming.”
Yes it was a missed opportunity. Because you picked the wrong man and let him buy the wrong players. Did it again with the next fella too.
What universally comes across loud and clear from everyone who met Taylor is that he was a true gentleman.
Thomas had been dropped by Taylor when he was England boss and, when Taylor was appointed at Molineux, the pair hadn’t spoken since.
“We sort of both looked at each other to see who was going to make the first move we both smiled at each other and shook hands, ‘Good to see you’ etc. That’s what he was like.
“After football, when I was poorly with my illness, he was one of the first guys on the phone asking if there was anything he could do. He was fantastic that way. He really was a gentleman. He stood up to everything the press threw at him and he didn’t make excuses.
“Everybody attached to the club at the time saw it as a massive opportunity for Wolves to be a big club again.
Totally agreed. He was a lovely man. Doesn't make him a good manager though.
“The sad thing, which Wolves missed the opportunity of, was that Graham was the perfect man to go upstairs and be one of the first guys to do that. You see it everywhere now — a football guru between the manager and the board. He would have been ideal for that.”
Excuse me but where do you see this? In fact when GT did this role at Villa he ended up becoming manager. No ta.
Goodman is convinced that had Taylor stayed, Wolves’ recent history could have been very different.
“I have nothing but remarkably happy and fond memories of Graham, he was a footballing genius,” he said. “I’ll be eternally grateful to him for showing faith in me and bringing me to Wolverhampton Wanderers.
“He motivated players to run through brick walls for him. With managers like that, they’re Marmite for a player, you either love them or don’t like them, because once they’ve decided you’re not part of their plans, they can be quite ruthless. Fortunately for me I was on the good side of him and he motivated me and heightened my professionalism.
“Wolves could have established themselves in the top flight and that was why I went there.
“I viewed Wolves and Graham as a shoo-in, a certainty that they’d go up — if not in 1994-95, then the season after. I’m convinced that if promotion had happened, with the stadium, the resources, the fans, they would have gone on to establish themselves.”
Shut up Don.
Wolves have been playing catch-up ever since.
Well, we've been promoted three times since Taylor left. He managed 0 promotions. We're in Europe FFS. I fail to see how this is catch up.
Hokum and from a bloke who can't have been much more than 10 at the time. Go back and do it properly, then see me again.
