Looking back on the first Graham Taylor era, there are so many happy memories but I always feel sadness that those days were highly valued by us while some seemed to think of Watford as the anti-Christ of the game’s morality and progress.

Graham would go on the terraces as a young coach and listen to the fans lamenting the loss of the old W- formation: two wingers forward along with the striker, and two inside forwards tucked in centrally just behind. He believed fans wanted goalmouth action, shots, dashing wing-play and excitement. He did not believe in the simplistic style favoured by Dave Bassett who liked to play the offside game, the long ball through the middle and wanted his players “to get stuck in”, continually courting disciplinary trouble. Bassett, who played for Watford Reserves in the Ken Furphy era, was a regular visitor to evening games at Vicarage Road and he and his minions made many notes.

The irony was that Bassett deployed a stripped-down version of Graham’s tactics, which did not provoke the press to ire but instead had them labelled “the Crazy Gang”. When Wimbledon gained promotion to the top flight, Graham clearly did not associate his style of play with Bassett’s. Instead, he welcomed Wimbledon to the division and the challenge their simple tactics would present.

“You have a big keeper, booting the ball as far down the middle with a long kick and First Division defences have to sort that out under considerable pressure,” he said.

Clearly he considered Wimbledon’s tactics as an entirely different challenge from the one his own teams constituted.

Graham abhorred the offside game and Watford never indulged in it during those ten years, until Bassett turned up at Vicarage Road. Almost immediately Bassett advocated the offside game and, in the pre-season tour in Sweden and Finland, introduced his pattern of play. Players emerged from the dressing room and informed me somewhat angrily that Bassett wanted to take football back 20 years.

Ironically, that was the very same claim made by Watford’s critics five years earlier, yet the players who had to change from that 1982 style to Bassett’s direct tactics saw a very obvious distinction. It was a distinction that eluded the critics who tagged Taylor as propagating “long ball football” instead of the passing game and tended to ignore Wimbledon’s approach.

When Watford first threatened to break into the top flight, Terry Venables and his mate, Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail, started the sniping. Venables came out highly critical claiming that coaching would involve telling players to kick the ball as far forward as possible if they went the Watford way. “Imagine a boy going to school just practising by booting the ball forward,” said Venables, who tended to hold court with certain journalists on a Monday afternoon at QPR.

I suggested the same pupil, adopting Venables’ style of play, would never get to school because back-passing was one of the more notable aspects of QPR’s approach. Key members of the press were in Venables’ camp, seeing him as the future England boss.

The irony was that in a BBC special on up and coming managers, Taylor had been asked back in 1976 as to what change to the rule would he introduce to improve the visual aspect of the game. His answer was simple: “Ban the back-pass to the keeper.” For a while football did just that.

So there were two distinct camps in Fleet Street: those who lauded “Venners” and those who thought Graham was a breath of fresh air. Graham once observed that those who referred to the QPR boss as “Venners” were in his camp.

I have already stressed in the recent newspaper supplement that Watford adopted the pressing game, always seeking to regain possession as early as possible, so catching the opposition on the front foot and relatively unprepared at the back. This, years ahead of its time, was ignored by the critics.

Another point for which Taylor and Watford were never to be given credit was the Hornets finished second to Forest’s Brian Clough in the Fair Play League, as the clubs with the least bookings and dismissals. None of this was acknowledged as Watford progressed up the league and sustained First Division football for five years under Graham.

They were magical days, full of sweat and hard graft but also the flair and pace as Luther Blissett and John Barnes worried the opposition; Nigel Callaghan could supply deadly accurate crosses and Ross Jenkins, who was only booked once in his career, was labelled the battering ram by critics seeking simplistic reasons for Watford’s success.

True, some 20 or so years earlier, Cliff Holton had hit the diagonal ball inside the opposition full back to enable the scurrying Mickey Benning and Freddie Bunce to race after the ball and cross it. There Dennis Uphill contested the cross and if it fell loose, Big Cliff would thunder the leather ball into the net.

Yes that was simplistic, but it involved inspired wing play, goalmouth incidents and fulminating shots. Those who witnessed that era revere it still and you can count me among that number and Graham, had he been a spectator, would have been a fan as well. In Graham’s subsequent era, Callaghan and Barnes had more to their locker than Benning or Bunce, but I fancy Benning was far quicker as he possessed Blissett-type pace, while Cally did not need to beat a man to put over a cross.

But Taylor’s football was not simplistic. Portrayed as kicking the ball down the middle for the players to charge after it, in fact it was far subtler. Graham worked on the pattern of play day after day, every week along with set-pieces. He believed in attacking play and liked the players to pass and cross in the opposition half. Everyone knew his options in every set position and, because of this constant work on pattern of play, all his colleagues knew those options as well and reacted positively to them.

They were well drilled, which some saw as being regimented. Was there anything regimented about the dribbling of Barnes, the pacey runs of Blissett and Cally’s crosses? Statistically and visually, that was the greatest team in Watford FC’ history.