Peter Taylor, the one-time England manager, is fighting for survival at the foot of the National League with Dagenham & Redbridge.
The reaction to the latest stop in the 65-year-old’s itinerant career has been consistent. Wow! And also, why?
This is not the sort of move former England managers make. Who could envisage, say, Sven-Göran Eriksson – the man for whom Taylor kept the England seat warm on a caretaker basis in 2000 – at Braintree or Boreham Wood? “Ha. No, definitely not,” Taylor says, with a smile.
He is a natural teller of stories, warm and engaging company even if his tough streak is easy to discern and he brings up one about an encounter he had on returning to his native Essex in 2012 after his time with Bahrain. “I’d gone for a walk with my wife and a fella stopped me and said: ‘Peter Taylor, isn’t it?’” he says. “I said: ‘Yeah,’ and he said: ‘You’ll never die wondering, will you?’ I thought to myself: ‘That’s a good title for my autobiography.’”
Taylor’s 32 years in management have seen him take charge of 15 clubs, with three separate spells at Gillingham. The most far-flung destination was in India, with Kerala Blasters. At international level, there was Bahrain, two stints with the England Under-21s, one with the Under-20s, and that single game at the helm of the senior team. A 1-0 friendly defeat against Italy in Turin was memorable for Taylor’s decision to hand the captaincy to a bloke called David Beckham. To complete the picture, Taylor has been the assistant manager at Watford and the New Zealand national team, when he was based in England.
Taylor went into Dagenham over the summer with his eyes wide open. He knew about the financial problems created when the then majority shareholder, Glyn Hopkin, withdrew his funding – which was compensating for an overspend – at the end of last year. Hopkin would resign as a director in February.
From the turn of the year to the end of last season, Dagenham were £250,000 short of meeting their commitments. It has been a fraught period, in which they have battled to stay afloat by offloading players. West Ham helped by visiting for a friendly at Victoria Road in March while Hopkin made a substantial donation in order to help them pay the wage bill. The reality of the constraints on Taylor have nevertheless been bracing. He has operated on a budget one third the size of last season’s and there is the sense every penny is accounted for.
Dagenham no longer even feed their players after training. The squad bring their own food. “We give them a breakfast,” Taylor says. “It’s cereals, toast, fruit. The lady here does marvellous. I think the maximum it costs her for all the players is £30 a week. They bring their own stuff for lunches.
“Steve Thompson, the managing director, told me they had fed the players last season and it cost a few bob. I said: ‘If I do away with that, can I have a fitness coach to come in twice a week?’ Steve said yes.”
The travel arrangements for away matches have been affected. The club have asked the players to drive themselves to stadiums that are less than 100 miles away while overnight accommodation for longer trips has been done away with. Last season they stayed over before the Barrow game but for Saturday’s visit to the Cumbrian club, they were on the 8.30am train from Euston to Lancaster, before a 70-minute coach ride to Barrow-in-Furness. And again, the players take packed lunches.
“It’s a reality check,” Taylor says. “But if these sort of things are the reason you fail as a professional footballer, you ain’t good enough. We drove to Aldershot [for a 2-1 defeat last month] and there is no way that journey in the cars affected the result. If players use that as an excuse, they’ll use any excuse. They’ve probably got big mirrors at home and they are not looking at them. This is a real world – on and off the pitch. I think it should make a player.”
Taylor has leaned heavily on his contacts, pulling in favours to get players in on loan for nothing. The key to those deals was a promise that they would play, with the prospect of improving under Taylor an added benefit. He says that some of his other squad members are on £200 a week.
“I’ve had a load of people trying to trial or come and train with us and I say: ‘You realise I’ve got no money?’” Taylor says. “They probably think: ‘Yeah, he’s got some money.’ But we’ve got no money. A scout wants to do some work for us and I say: ‘We’ve got no money. We can’t give you 40p a mile.’ It’s been a bit embarrassing in some ways.
“I’m doing an after-dinner speech on 28 September and it’s to help pay for the goalie coach. Talk about singing for your supper. I’ll just talk about my experiences – like when I was a Tottenham player with the Argentinians, Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa. They didn’t understand English if it meant running up and down but they understood English easy enough if it meant getting £250 to open a sports shop.”
Taylor won four caps for England as a winger but is no stranger to life at the other end of the spectrum. He finished his playing career with spells at Maidstone, Heybridge Swifts, Chelmsford and Dartford – he was the player-manager at the last of these – while he has worked as a manager at Enfield, Hendon, Dover and Stevenage when they were a non-league club.
“I am very lucky,” Taylor says. “I’ve got two pensions and I don’t need to work. But I’m here because I want to be here. I live 30 miles away [in Southend] and it ticks a lot of boxes for me in terms of family life, with my wife, two daughters and three grandkids. I like this level of football. People appreciate the value of a pound note.”
Taylor has even seen the upside to Dagenham’s lack of money. It has meant the squad are packed with young players – more senior ones are unaffordable – and he has always enjoyed working with youngsters. For his one England game, he famously called up a host of under-21s.
The downside is young players make mistakes and Dagenham have been punished this season. They had to wait until Tuesday for their first victory – a 1-0 home win over Braintree. Yet Taylor’s glass is resolutely half full and not only because the club are in advanced talks with a consortium of American investors who promise financial stability.
“I’ve had good friends ring me up and I think they’re expecting me to be all down,” Taylor says. “But I’m the opposite. They’ve said: ‘Blimey, we didn’t expect you to be so upbeat.’ That’s the romance of it all, I suppose.”
The Guardian Sport
