As England kick off another quest to reach a World Cup in North America, FFT relives Graham Taylor’s ill-fated qualifying campaign for USA 94 – and the fly-on-thewall documentary that became infamous...

Words Sam Delaney

O slo, June 2, 1993. One of the bleakest moments in the history of English football was about to get bleaker. The men’s national team trailed 1-0at half-time to Egil Olsen’s Norwegian long-ball merchants. World Cup qualification had slipped further from Graham Taylor’s grasp. The England manager’s duo of lieutenants, Phil Neal and Lawrie McMenemy, sat either side of him, staring blankly into space. A camera on the ground pointed up at their faces, capturing their anguish and (REVISITED) despair. Catching his own reflection in the lens, McMenemy uncharacteristically lost his cool: “Graham, you need to get rid of that for a start,” he snapped, pointing an accusatory finger at the camera. “You’ll f**king hang yourself!” bristled Taylor, hissing back: “Lawrie, don’t you f**king worry about it.”

This squabble could have opened what became one of the most controversial football documentaries ever made. But, thanks to Taylor’s intervention during the editing process, it was one of several sequences the public would never see.

“I SAID, ‘THANK YOU EVER SO MUCH’”

A camera crew had been following the England team for four months, Taylor having granted them unprecedented access to the inner workings of the national setup. They would go on to catalogue what may still be England’s most ill-fated campaign, as Taylor’s hapless side lurched from one disaster to another. Cameras captured every argument, every slice of implausible bad luck, every gem of training ground banter and every tragicomic moment of heartbreak along the way.

When it was first aired on Channel 4 in January 1994, for the series Cutting Edge and under the title An Impossible Job, viewers and critics didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. From the jaw-dropping abundance of swearing to the apparent idiocy of the coaching staff, and the plethora of Taylorisms that quickly entered the national lexicon (such as the rhetorical, “Can we not knock it?!” and the baffling, “Do I not like that?”), it had the nation engrossed. Although many assumed him to have been the victim of a TV stitch-up, Taylor himself was complicit in almost every detail of the project. And 17 years later, he remained unrepentant. “I don’t regret it – in a way, I’m proud,” he told FourFourTwo in 2011. “It was truthful, honest, soul-bearing, and there was no hiding from anything. We didn’t try to dress anything up.”

You can say that again…

“WHAT IF IT GOES WRONG?”

In 1992, Neil Duncanson, head of a fledgling production company called Chrysalis Sport, was trying to develop a list show entitled The Worst Job In The World. One of the jobs on the list was that of England manager, and Taylor had expressed an interest in taking part. An abject showing at the 1992 European Championship, when England went out in the group stage, had led to parts of the media and public turning against him. Taylor considered the documentary as a possible solution. “I was two years into the job and I had started to learn how different it was to club management,” he recalled to FFT. “I thought it was important that people saw the reality.

“Of course, I felt sure we would qualify for the World Cup at the time.”

Television channels weren’t interested in The Worst Job In The World but, with access to the England coach already secured, Chrysalis decided to focus the idea on him. Duncanson remembered that, “Graham had misgivings and said, ‘What if it goes wrong?’ I was honest and told him that, win or lose, we would film it regardless. Fair play to him – he still agreed.”