Week 30: Loyalty In The Time Of Coronavirus
A little over twelve months ago, I upset a Charlton fan when I talked about something other than Leagues One and Two in the column (spoiler: I do that a lot), so I’m treading on eggshells here. However, now they are back in D3, I hope there won’t be a problem.
For various reasons, I’ve followed the Lyle Taylor situation with interest and saw that, at the weekend, it came to a conclusion when he signed for…[drum roll] Nottingham Forest.
No disrespect to Forest. I live in the city – a mile from their ground – and have for almost twenty years. I know they are a potentially big club and have done incredible things forty years ago (the first European Cup Final I watched was their win over Hamburg in 1980). But then this isn’t really about Nottingham Forest.
Lyle Taylor scored 11 goals for Charlton Athletic in the Championship in 2019/20. The season before, his 21 league goals helped Lee Bowyer’s team gain an unlikely promotion via the play-offs. In June, he decided not to sign a short term extension during the lockdown and sit out the remainder of the season so it ‘didn’t jeopardise a big move’. A ‘life-changing’ one, as Bowyer called it.
So I kept an eye on it. What was ‘big’? What would be ‘life-changing?’
While ruling out the very big teams, I wondered about someone like Valencia. Maybe one of the top Portuguese teams? An ambitious French side perhaps? Both Rangers and Celtic expressed an interest at one stage but both moved onto other targets instead. A bottom-half Premier League team, possibly – Burnley were linked – or one aiming for promotion, West Brom were also mentioned. So were Sheffield Wednesday and Preston. And Sivasspor of Turkey.
But, no, it was Nottingham Forest. You begin to wonder what all the fuss was about.
It’s a decent city, sure, but life-changing it is not. Especially now they’ve suspended rebuilding of the Broadmarsh Centre and Jamie’s has closed down.
It’s the Forest that were in the same division as Charlton last season (and might still be, but more on that later). In fact, Charlton took four of the six points on offer – and Taylor scored in both games – between the clubs.
His recent record as a goal-scorer isn’t in question. As well as his goals for Charlton, he was previously AFC Wimbledon’s record scorer during their football league era with 55 goals in all competitions. Before that he’d scratched around the National League and SPFL circuit with two prolific seasons for Concord Rangers and Falkirk in 2009/10 and 2012/13 respectively.
He also does a lot for charity and anti-racism, both admirable but neither that make his actions here look any better even though I do get the counter-arguments. It’s a short career and they have to make the most of it. They might get injured. This might be a last big contract.
But nearly all careers are short these days, even at Marks and Spencers. We might all get injured just stepping off the kerb and he might just as easily be sold by Forest to someone else in 18 months-time and get another pay rise. It’s a lot of ‘mights’.
Of course, the dreaded coronavirus also intervened but that only makes Taylor’s actions worse. If it hadn’t come along and suspended the season, he would have never considered downing tools before the end of it. Not many footballers do.
Like M&S (take the furlough, take the back to work bonus, still get rid of the staff afterwards), he wanted it all. Take the money, don’t play and get hurt, leave afterwards for more money.
I wonder if any of the clubs who looked at him considered this? I’d be amazed if some of them didn’t in a time where Liverpool have shown that the fabric of a person is as important as what they do with their feet.
On that, Taylor is good with his feet but not that good. Did he score the 32 goals for Charlton by intercepting a pass, beating all of the opposition and putting the ball in the net? No; he’s not Pele in Escape to Victory. He scored from passes, crosses and other manner of assists from his Charlton team-mates.
The same team-mates who are now back in League One. Or that have been released as the club try to reduce their wage bill. With the new salary cap, others might have had to take a significant cut in their salaries.
Not to mention the other staff at the club. It’s a fair bet that relegation will lead to some job cuts even without the coronavirus impact. With the financial gap between the Championship and League One clubs so wide, relegation was a huge blow.
Charlton eventually went down by a point. After restarting with a win at hapless Hull City, then beating QPR, they either drew or lost the rest of their games by a single goal, until a final night collapse at champions Leeds.
A single goal in any of those other games would have probably kept them up.
A goalless draw at Cardiff took them into July in good spirits and with a great chance of staying up. But for all their chances created against Millwall, they lost to a late goal, then lost narrowly to Brentford before another 0-1 home defeat (to Reading) came after they missed a host of opportunities.
A draw at Birmingham pulled them back into trouble as the home team equalised deep into injury time, then Charlton themselves did the same against Wigan to draw; a result that eventually had dire consequences for both teams.
If just one of those spurned chances had gone in, it would have given them the extra point or two they needed to stay up. Can you think of anyone who might have tucked at least one away?
Lee Bowyer, the Charlton manager, was convinced that had Taylor played, they’d still be in the Championship but conceded that the replacement players still should have put the chances away too. To his credit, Bowyer tried to deflect the story at the time and concentrate on the players he had available. But what else was he to do? You could tell he was desperately hurt and disappointed.
They couldn’t sign anyone as a replacement (it was mid-season and the club were already under a transfer embargo) so it was a double whammy as it gave other teams with fully fit and willing squads a post-COVID advantage.
Perhaps his most telling line came after the defeat at Elland Road, coupled with Barnsley’s winner at Brentford, that condemned his team to League One.
“I feel for everyone behind the scenes. We have a group of players and fans that care so much. All we wanted was to be given a fair chance but it felt like backs against walls all the time and the rug getting pulled from beneath us.
I don’t know what the other players really think. They tend to stay quiet but some would have felt equally let down. [Nb. I know he wasn’t the only player to do this at Charlton but he was the most high-profile]
Charlton legend, Darren Bent, said this. ‘For me, he let the club down. As a player, I get it, but I don’t think the Charlton fans will ever forgive him.’
He’s probably right. To be fair, some did share good luck messages when his deal with Forest was announced but there was plenty of vitriol aimed at those fans, and Taylor himself, before and after, by others who felt the divide couldn’t be crossed.
‘You’ll love him. Till you realise @lyletaylor90 doesn’t give a fcuk about anyone but himself’ was a typical theme but some put it a little better. For instance, self-confessed long-suffering fan, Damian Walters tweeted ‘@lyletaylor90 cannot be blamed for @CAFCOfficial relegation but at a time when his friends, colleagues and generations of supporters needed him the most, he simply turned his back on them. Unforgiveable.’
Taylor himself said it was ‘water off a duck’s back.’
A lot of those ‘behind the scenes’ people won’t find it so easy to let it slide. Some will no longer be at the club as the price of relegation becomes apparent. Every man (and woman) for himself, eh?
But strikers need to be selfish, right? Not just strikers. The whole world has become more selfish in general. And if selfishness pervades society then, just as with any other social problem, why not football too?
But if it was the right thing to do, why didn’t lots of others? Any player nearing the end of a contract was putting themselves at similar risk, yet they didn’t make the same choice. Perhaps they just understood the no ‘I’ in team a little bit more.
Because it’s all connected. Lyle Taylor didn’t get here by himself and all those team-mates and people behind the scenes helped along the way, either in training, matches or just cooking his meals at the training ground. Charlton gave him a chance to reach the Championship after buying him from AFC Wimbledon and he repaid their faith with the goals to get them there. But they got there as a team – it wasn’t LTFC – and when he left, it’s worth noting they didn’t even receive a penny.
For his part, I presume that the player also refused to be paid for the weeks from lockdown until the end of his contract, or will be giving it back when Forest’s cheque clears. But maybe I’m also being a bit naïve there.
The reason given for his decision was fear of injury, although as it was an injury that might stop a life-changing move, the real reason was, inevitably and of course, money. He had suffered an injury already in 2019 and he actually missed part of last season (from late-August until December) to it, caused by a knee problem sustained while on international duty for Monserrat.
So he got injured playing for his country, then missed several games for his club who continued to pay him and provide medical care until he was fit again. Then when the time came and his club needed him most, he used that same injury as the very rationale for letting them down.
“I’m gutted at the way it’s finishing,” he said after announcing his decision not to feature – it’s worth also pointing out that he was under contract for three of the games he refused to play in – “but I don’t expect people to care. I know that once the damage is done it’s irreparable and I don’t really expect any sympathy.”
And, as Boris Johnson asked, he’d completely washed his hands of the whole thing.
Although not quite. He also put out a social media post showing him training with a 5-a-side team on the day of a Charlton game after the resumption. If he wanted to give the fans even more reason to dislike him, he did a great job.
Perhaps that’s because – for now at least – football fans still support a team more than they do an individual player and that team is always bigger than one man. I know that no-one expects players to be a fan of the club and it’s a transient world where they move a lot, but when a player refuses to support the team in the best way he can for his own ends, despite what it means to thousands of others, then it’s another sad moment for the game.
The ‘winner’ here appears to be Nottingham Forest. They’ve signed a proven Championship striker for absolutely nothing (in a world where Ivan Toney receives a £10m bid) so as long as they are at peace with his actions and dis-loyalty, it’s – as they say – all good.
Forest clearly want a striker so they will overlook the issues. Strikers come and go quickly at the City Ground and they’ve had their fair share of difficult ones in the past (a couple even went on strike) but if he scores the goals that finally gets them back to the PL after all this time, they won’t care. If he doesn’t, they’ll just get rid of him to some other club. And Lyle Taylor can’t really blame them.
When it comes to loyalty, maybe that’s what they mean when they say you get what you pay for.
words Darren Young, D3D4 columnist