Charlie Taylor ⭑ From A-Z since '92
Massimo Cellino wanted the credit, and Leeds fans wanted a good local left-back. But Charlie Taylor wanted the Premier League.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
Charlie Taylor was a Leeds United fan's dream because he was a local, homegrown player and a very good left-back. We're always wishing for one or the other but both at once was a treat. Then he doubled up a different way. For a while Taylor was one quarter of the future of Leeds United but, in the end, he contrived to be both longest lasting of the four and the least lamented.
Taylor's ascent to United's first team was textbook. Born in York, a pupil at Tadcaster Grammar, a recruit to Leeds United's youth teams, he was not pitched in the way his elder peers Sam Byram, Alex Mowatt and Lewis Cook were. He showed up briefly in Simon Grayson's team as a seventeen year old in autumn 2011, but for most of the next two seasons he was learning on loan at Bradford City, York City, Inverness Caledonian Thistle — playing for Terry Butcher — and Fleetwood Town, where he won the League Two play-offs at Wembley after beating his hometown York in the semi-final.
While Sam Byram's young legs were straining through his ever presence in Neil Warnock's side, Taylor only played one first half, learning his craft elsewhere free from the febrile pressure the manager was putting on players like Zac Thompson, and from the desperate chaos engulfing Warnock's successor Brian McDermott.
The loan moves also indicated something about the work required to make more of Taylor's relative talent. Byram had looked like what he was from the first game he played, at nineteen: the season's player and young player of the year. After Mowatt made his debut, aged eighteen, he was only out of United's first team when Dave Hockaday sent him to the Under-23s for getting injured while jogging in the streets in pre-season. When Neil Redfearn took caretaker charge of Leeds in autumn 2014, he immediately put seventeen-year-old Lewis Cook into his midfield. It took Redfearn having a second spell in charge, the acrimonious departure of captain Stephen Warnock and an experimental line-up in the FA Cup at Sunderland for Taylor to have a sustained spell at left-back, aged 21.
Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
"He comes across as a quiet, unassuming lad but he's very switched on and very calculated," said Redfearn. "I think he's tailor-made for first team football at this level. No matter what's gone on with Stephen Warnock, it's wrong to be holding Charlie back. The time's right for him and he needs a run."
Even on that run he was soon shuffled forward as Redfearn tried to sneak some attacking width under owner Massimo Cellino's distracted nose. That was the great thing about Taylor compared to the other options at left-back, Gaetano Berardi and Liam Cooper: rather than a pure defender, he had attacking instincts that made him the archetype of a modern wing-back, or an inheritor of Tony Dorigo or Terry Cooper's stylish overlapping.
It was something to cling to, anyway, as Leeds lost five consecutive games, six players refused to travel to a match at Charlton, the team limped to 15th place and the average attendance dipped below 25,000: Taylor, with Byram, Cook and Mowatt, looked like one of a core four Leeds could build a new team around, or at least a new season ticket advertising campaign around (also featuring a very, very young Archie Gray).
"All the young lads keep getting better," said Taylor, "and if everyone is together and we keep building the team, you never know what can happen. It's exciting times ahead over the next year or so and players are going to be attracted to come to Leeds."
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