MIDWAY through his debut season as a Swindon Town player, Matt Taylor took charge of his first game as a manager. It ended 3-0 to the opposition, and Taylor called the whole experience “a nightmare.”
Following retirement in 2019, and spells as the head coach at Tottenham Hotspur Under-18s and Walsall, the 40-year-old says he learned the hard way that the only thing that matters in management is winning.
In an interview with The Coaches’ Voice, Taylor discussed his footballing ideals and his journey from player-coach at the County Ground to an out-of-work boss who has learned so much about himself.
Discussing his time at Swindon, Taylor said: “I’d had a bit of a shock introduction to management three years earlier.
“I had been signed for Swindon Town by David Flitcroft in the summer of 2017, but halfway through the season he resigned. The chairman asked if I would take charge of the team for the weekend’s game against Cheltenham. I turned him down at first, but he insisted.
“I was enjoying my football then, playing in League Two as my career wound down, and starting to think about how exactly I’d move into coaching.
“I'd started my coaching badges at 29, when I was at West Ham United. After seeing too many of my teammates come to the realisation too late that they wanted to do something after playing, I decided I needed a plan. I knew that that part of my career could easily last longer than my playing career, so I wanted to make something of it. I wanted to be ready when the time came to retire from playing by completing my Pro Licence."
Taylor played 76 times for Swindon between 2017-19, scoring 10 goals and providing 13 assists before hanging up his boots to take a role in Spurs' academy.
Having jumped into an ill-fated stint at the Poundland Bescot Stadium, the 40-year-old is now considering his options before returning to management in the future.
He continued: “As a Premier League footballer, it was great. I could go and have a chat with Sam Allardyce or Harry Redknapp or Sean Dyche or whoever else – top coaches I was playing under – to learn about what we were doing, and why we were doing it. I’d had plenty of time to think about becoming a coach while playing under some of the best in the business.
“But the Swindon job still took me by surprise. I wasn’t really ready, but I was thrown in. The week was complicated further when, after deciding I shouldn’t play on the Saturday, and doing all of our preparation for the game without me in the team, we got an injury. I had to start the game.
“To be honest, it was a nightmare. We started well enough but went behind to a free-kick, and then my mind was all over the place. I was trying to think about and make substitutions while playing. I had to tell teammates to go down for treatment so I could run across the pitch and chat to my coaches. I can’t explain how difficult that was.
“We lost the game 3-0 and I went back to playing, but I stayed on as a coach under the new manager, Phil Brown.
“My one game in charge of Swindon hadn’t given me the bug to become a manager – quite the opposite, really! It just gave me more hunger to learn and develop as a coach. Just like when I was a player, I was ready to work harder than anyone else to become the best coach I could be.”
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