Meet Leeds Under-23s new dad, Andy Taylor

Andy Taylor didn’t want to be Leeds United Under-23s’ new dad, but needs must. Taylor, who made almost 450 appearances in a fourteen year playing career, is part of a new trend of players taking a look at a position in the dugout and sensibly deciding, ‘No thanks, I’d rather be a sporting director.’ He studied for a masters in sports directorship at Manchester Met University towards the end of his career, joining Leeds as loan manager after coaching at Sunderland, but has taken over the U23s until the end of the season following Mark Jackson’s promotion to the first-team coaching staff under Jesse Marsch.

“It’s been quite a whirlwind few days,” he told LUTV after taking his first game in charge, officially launching the most exciting cup run of Leeds’ season with a 1-1 draw at Mansfield. “It’s something I wasn’t expecting, but it’s happened and I’m enjoying it.”

He has taken over in a moment when fans are scrutinising Leeds’ use of youth players and loans, waiting to see how the club’s approach to player development changes now Marsch has replaced Marcelo Bielsa. Taylor might not want to be a coach going forward, but since Mateusz Bogusz’s knackered knee has robbed him of an excuse to visit Ibiza (just going to check on him… again), he should learn a lot about future loanees’ minds by working with a bunch of players looking enviously at Cody Drameh in Cardiff’s first team. Hanging around at Thorp Arch has to be better than chatting to Kiko Casilla about sitting on Elche’s bench or visiting Alfie McCalmont to tell him Marsch has followed Bielsa by watching nineteen hours of his footage, and agreed he should stay in Morecambe. He can still keep in text contact with Laurens De Bock, if he wants to.

If loads of the U23s do want a loan move — which was only one way of interpreting Bielsa’s comments in January — Taylor has a helpful perspective as a former member of a promising youth team, whose first experience of senior football came on loan at Bradford in 2005/06, making his professional debut with them at his hometown club Hartlepool. He was grateful for the experience, but the big regret of his career was not appreciating the environment he was brought up in at Middlesbrough, learning from the likes of Gareth Southgate and Mark Viduka.

“[It was] quite unbelievable and at the time I certainly didn’t know any different, so you maybe take it for granted a little bit,” he told the BBC. “That’s all we knew as academy players, going into five star facilities, with, we’re not talking about good players, we’re talking about world class international players. If that hasn’t benefited me in my career, maybe without even realising — just being able to watch how they conduct themselves, how they train, the quality, the standards they set every single day; that has had a huge impact on my career and my life as well. Looking back, what an amazing time of my life that was.”

Taylor might have been reminding Amari Miller how lucky playing for Leeds makes him after the U23s draw with Mansfield. The new manager was heard urging Miller to improve his body language — the winger was sulking after being asked to swap sides with Stuart McKinstry. Taylor was trying to spark an improvement with his team losing 1-0, but Miller was so slow he missed the chance to switch when the ball was out of play and had to sulk back to his original position, throwing himself into an ugly tantrum of a tackle seconds later. It didn’t take long for Taylor to replace Miller with Mateo Joseph, and as the cameras lingered on the pitch at full-time, another coach seemed to be annoyed by an unsatisfactory handshake from Miller, who walked past with his hands in his pockets before offering a cursory slap.

When Taylor was at Middlesbrough, he was part of an academy side dubbed the club’s ‘Golden Generation’ after winning the 2004 FA Youth Cup. Of that team, Taylor is among only a handful to enjoy a long professional career, and none are household names (apart from one former Leeds loanee, who is a household name for the wrong reasons). Fellow defender Matthew Bates spent eight seasons in Boro’s first team, but his career was ruined by five serious knee injuries. Maybe I was misreading the exchange with Miller at Mansfield, or maybe the coach was guilty of cramping Miller’s style, but when a career can be so fleeting, just smile and shake the man’s hand, Amari! This is meant to be the fun bit!

Taylor knows all too well that football can quickly stop being fun. He ended his career at Bolton, where he was voted the squad’s PFA representative while the club was going into administration, facing winding up orders, and unable to pay its staff for five months. The problems of his teammates and the club’s non-playing staff became Taylor’s problems. One player was evicted because he couldn’t pay his rent. An U23s player with a young child couldn’t afford his train fare to training from Liverpool. Other staff were struggling to buy nappies and eventually needed help from a foodbank. It became all Taylor ever talked about with his wife. He could have signed for boyhood club Hartlepool after leaving Bolton but, still emotionally exhausted, decided to retire and go to Victoria Park as a supporter instead. “It’s only now, when I can sit back and look, how much impact that actually had on my personal life and my family life,” he said in September 2019. “I think at the time you don’t really realise, you are that engrossed in the situation.”

Taylor is unlikely to decide these players’ futures, but his own experiences as a player and the insights he gains coaching them through the rest of the season should help inform the club’s policy regarding their development. Will he see a grumpy Miller and think he needs to be sent to a north-west seaside town, or will he try to impress on him the privilege of learning at Thorp Arch? Avoiding relegation from the top division of the Premier League 2 is also likely to be a factor; the U23s are copying the first team, sitting just outside the relegation zone but after more games than the sides below.

Whether Taylor remains U23s boss or returns to his role as loan manager, the coaching reshuffle means one of those jobs will need filling come the summer. If we don’t know which, we’ll have to start talking to a candidate with experience of both, which means only one thing: the campaign to get Andy Hughes back to Leeds United starts now. ⬢