Graham Taylor was one of the good guys in fighting prejudice

COMMENT: Book claims former England manager was told to put quota on black players, something Taylor has denied

England manager Roy Hodgson (L) poses with former England managers (L-R) Graham Taylor, Terry Venables, Fabio Capello and Sven-Goran Eriksson (GETTY IMAGES)

It is a sign of the vast strides that football has taken in the fight against discrimination, these past 10 years, that the story of an England manager being approached by two Football Association men in blazers and told to ease up on the number of black players being picked for the side barely entered the national conversation when it surfaced in 2004.

A journalist who had attended the Kick it Out organisation’s 10th anniversary lunch, where Graham Taylor was one of the few coaches present, left the event with the distinct sense that the former manager had been indignant about the alleged approach by those in authority. He put it to Taylor, again and again, call after call, but none was returned. The story – The Guardian’s – was a diary item.

Even in those years of the new millennium, Kick it Out was on the margins, too. “They all thought we were crackpots,” Piara Powar, now director of Football Against Racism in Europe, told me last night. “There were all sorts of stories and rumours about the different kinds of discrimination that people could not trace.”

Although he said Taylor made no direct comments to him, Powar was one of the many who left the lunch with the impression that Taylor had been tackled about black players. There were many who could have tried to exert such influence, from the County FAs up, back in the early 1990s. And there is a view among those who have tackled prejudice in football that Taylor would not have been one to allow any such slight pass by. “A progressive man” was how he and his conduct in those days was recalled last night.

There can be no doubt that some of the black players Taylor selected for England in abundant numbers in the early 1990s were crossing a Rubicon with him. Taylor was certainly colour blind in the way he helped turn Watford forwards Luther Blissett and John Barnes into England internationals but those players have both testified to the abuse they took. It was the same story for the last player Taylor called up into an England squad, before his fateful last stand against San Marino in 1993. We will probably never know precisely what kind of slights Taylor heard delivered against those players. In his discussion with The Independent last night, he indicated in the strongest terms available that whatever he said at the Kick it Out lunch – where the talk would have certainly have centred on discrimination – had been exaggerated.

Yet the story – enhanced or otherwise – is a reminder of what black players did have to go through as they sought to demonstrate that they were as good as all the rest. And it is reminder of how Taylor – sitting in the room with the group that some of his fellow professionals would have looked at askance – led the battle against small mindedness and prejudice. “He was exceptional. One of the good ones,” says one who watched him fight the progressive fight.