Elton John's brief surge of enthusiasm clearly dissipated soon after the season started. I saw him once for a brief interview but he backed Dave Bassett and moved the conversation on to other things. Years later Muir Stratford, a fellow director, revealed Elton “admitted it was a mistake”.

To my mind the biggest disappointment was the ditching of the club’s general approach and standards, on and off the field: standards by which the club had established itself. Of course Bassett, as he subsequently admitted, “came in like Jack the Lad instead of sitting back and seeing how things were going”. He changed too much, too quickly and did not appreciate what he had inherited.

This was undoubtedly Elton John’s error because he did not seek a manager who suited the ethos.

As for Bassett’s football credentials, people might be surprised when I said I could see the logic of Elton’s thinking. If you look at the managers from Harry Kent, through the post-war and immediate post war years, including Bill McGarry, Ken Furphy and Graham Taylor, Bassett had the best credentials of all of them. He had achieved three promotions. Not even Taylor had achieved that when he came to Watford in 1977.

Looking on through Steve Harrison, Colin Lee, Steve Perryman and Glenn Roeder, none of those managers who followed Bassett had ever managed a promotion-winning side. Until Graham returned, Bassett had the most impressive CV of all Watford’s managerial appointments. We might not have liked his style or approach but he had experienced success. Subsequently, of all the managers Watford have appointed, Ray Lewington had tasted promotion and, although listed as a coach, had in fact managed the team.

So Bassett was a proven manager with small-town club credentials. It was the style and the approach and ultimately his player recruitment that proved his undoing at Watford.

Said Muir: “We had a management team who knew what they were doing, ran the club and ran it well and we let them get on with it. If Elton had brought up the subject of appointing Dave Bassett, we would have been against it: ironically me less so than two other directors. I just did not feel it was right for the club. The supporters did not like him either. In a way you had to feel slightly sorry for Dave Bassett but he just was not right.”

Eventually the decision was made, Bassett left and Watford recruited their former coach Steve Harrison, who was Graham’s right-hand man at Aston Villa, as manager.

There was logic in this respect, because it was getting back in touch with the continuity and the approach that had been jettisoned when Bassett arrived.

“We all agreed that appointment, as a board. We knew it was a bit of a gamble but Steve knew the club. But it did not fully work, because Steve, by his own admission, was not a number one,” said Muir, referring to Harrison’s subsequent revelation that he learnt he was not a manager.

Elton duly threw some money at the project of getting Watford back into the top flight but despite reaching the Play-off semi-finals and not being beaten in two matches, the bid for a return to the top tier came to an end.

The following March, with relegation to the third tier a possibility, Harrison resigned and Watford’s board took a unanimous decision to give Colin Lee the job.

Throughout this period, Elton John had attempted to sell the club. The Robert Maxwell deal was revived while Bassett was still at the helm in 1987. Maxwell already had an interest in Oxford United and sought to circumvent the rules. Yet few at board level thought a deal could be brokered within the Football League’s rules.

“Geoff Smith and I knew it would not get sanctioned,” said Muir. “It was quite clear.”

It seemed Elton was desperate to unload. The directors were also on the sidelines when Elton had another deal set up with Michael Wrighton of kitchen fame and Charles Lissack. That bid fell through, although Lissack subsequently joined the board as an extremely knowledgeable director. He knew considerably more than the blank page footballer Len Shackleton used in his biography summing up what directors know of the game.

Soon Elton’s attempts to sell the club became a joke before he shed the load to Jack Petchey, collecting less than £1 million and accepting he had been repaid the loans for a nominal amount.

Later he rejoined the board but was to quit, it is said, when he noticed the loans, which had been paid off, were still on the books, now payable to new owner Jack Petchey.

Muir Stratford left the board, doing so unobtrusively by not offering himself for re-election.

He explained: “I left because I did not think we (Jack Petchey and I) were on the same wavelength. I decided I just could not really get on with Petchey. He thought we were West Ham United and we were not. We are a family club in Hertfordshire and he could not get his head around the fact we weren’t like West Ham.

“People get on and people don’t get on. Had I been a director for two years and not 19 years, I might have weathered it. Geoff was still there. There was nothing personal about Petchey. I just could not agree with his approach.”

As was often remarked, after the ten fat years of success and brilliance of the first Graham Taylor era, which ended in 1987, we were faced with nine or ten lean years, capped by the restrictive policies adopted by Jack Petchey with regards to the playing side of the club.

This article was first published in Friday's Watford Observer.