I finished Watford Forever, John Preston’s excellent new book about the friendship between Elton John and Graham Taylor and the effect it had on the town of Watford and the football club at its heart, feeling an unexpectedly profound sense of loss. The loss of a man I hardly knew, the joyful, fragile biosphere he created and a game I hardly recognise.
Two days after Taylor died in 2017, I took my son, who was seven at the time, to see Watford play Middlesbrough at Vicarage Road. I remember little of the game itself, which was overshadowed by the minute’s applause held in tribute to Taylor. As the crowd stood I looked around me and saw many hundreds of people of approximately my age, who would have been small children during Taylor’s first spell at the club, many of them with children of their own.
