Don Taylor: An appreciation
Club historian David Bull remembers our former physiotherapist, Don Taylor, who has died aged 88.
Don Taylor was in the right place at the right time when Southampton’s Board, having long got by without a physiotherapist, decided in November 1971 that it should no longer expect Jimmy Gallagher to be both the trainer and an unqualified physio who happened to have been through the FA’s Treatment of Injuries (ToI) course.
Manager Ted Bates saw no need to broadcast the vacancy: he knew the perfect man to ring for advice. While serving during the Second World War as an Army medic in the School for Massage at Netley Hospital, Bertie Mee had guested for the Saints as a winger, sometimes partnering Bates. Mee had become the physio at Arsenal in 1960 and the manager in 1966. He should surely have an idea or two for Bates. In fact, he had much more than that: he had Don Taylor.
Having recently left the Army, Don was at Highbury undergoing “resettlement”, a four-week stint of work experience in which an ex-soldier might learn how to adjust to civilian practice. Ever the talent-spotter, Mee recommended his learner to Bates. So Don came to The Dell not so much for an interview as for an installation.
There was a crucial condition, over which the Board had long been agonising: the post was full-time, with none of the private practice on the side, using the club’s facilities, that had become the norm at so many clubs. That suited Don just fine. Southampton FC paid him well to be exclusively theirs. Over and above his hands-on skills, he would need to develop two psychological attributes: to adjust to varying managerial expectations; and to suss out “injuries of convenience”.
He had no sooner settled into the fundamental role of advising manager Bates on how soon which injured players would be ready to play than Lawrie McMenemy arrived with a tendency “to use the treatment room like a punishment room”: injured men would be only too keen to escape that hostile environment by declaring themselves fit. Chris Nicholl was a “bit like” that, but Ian Branfoot, who’d done the ToI course, had a better understanding of recovery times. Alan Ball was a “bit like” Branfoot.
It followed that, if your manager was in punishment mode, you’d be tempted to play a sympathetic physio off against him: “Don says I need…”. Which meant that Don had to become a judge of which players to trust, especially if the alleged injury was, say, a muscle strain: “there’s nothing to see at all”. There was a condition known as “Liverpoolitis”, to describe a player’s miraculous recovery when the next opponents were the team of the seventies whom they all wanted to play against.
There were two types of Friday withdrawals. One was the kind of player who saw the teamsheets and didn’t fancy an away trip with the Reserves. Don named a notorious example, but I shall refrain from doing so. The other was Tony Knapp, who had left before Don arrived but whose reputation lived on. Notwithstanding his achievement of making 103 consecutive appearances, it seems that Knapp would occasionally declare a niggling injury on Friday, to make the evening Echo’s back page headline: will-he-won’t-he be fit on Saturday? That overnight drama achieved, he would invariably lead the team out on Saturday, perhaps never knowing that his backroom moniker was “the Friday Echo man”.
The above entertaining confessions of a physio notwithstanding, Don rated his era of Southampton footballers as respectful and mainly genuine. He was certainly less perturbed by some of their drinking habits than Bill Shankly was: they could by and large be trusted to be unaffected by alcohol come Saturday.
There were some seriously hard drinkers in the side that he accompanied to Wembley in 1976. Goodness knows why, but he’d not been on duty at away ties during the run. He confessed – whether to me or to Tim Manns, the chronicler of the run – that he had an especially soft spot for two of the players involved in it: Hugh Fisher, whom he’d nursed back from the most serious injury of all – a broken leg in 1971 – and Mick Channon, ever willing to be injected against pain and then to go out and score, winning him the “top of the tree” accolade in the Don Taylor pantheon of brave hearts.
Don Taylor (left) and captain Peter Rodrigues celebrate winning the FA Cup
Top pic: Don Taylor sits in the Dell dugout as part of Lawrie McMenemy’s support team for the penultimate match of the 1984/85 season, the manager’s last home game before he left for Sunderland. Left to right: Don Taylor, John Mortimore, Lawrie McMenemy, Lew Chatterley
Photos from the Holley Collection
