The pride and sense of privilege Lionel Birnie felt at working with Graham Taylor was a constant when I spoke to the former Watford Observer journalist about ghostwriting his autobiography, but so was the responsibility he felt; the responsibility to faithfully reproduce the late Hornets manager’s words and tell the story of his life and career how he wanted.

That story of a 40-year career in football will be available to be widely read for the first time from Thursday when Graham Taylor: In His Own Words is published, the result of a two-year collaboration between the two men prior to Graham’s sudden death in January, with the book subsequently completed in line with his wishes and the support of his widow, Rita, and the Taylor family.

The title of the book says everything about the perspective from which it was written, covering the former Grimsby Town and Lincoln City’s full-back playing days to his move into management, first with the Imps and then Watford’s remarkable rise up the divisions, to more success at Aston Villa, the ultimate disappointment and hurt of England, to restoring his reputation as a club manager back at Vicarage Road.

“When we first got together and talked about it, I started by asking him what it was he wanted the book to be and that was the basis we started work,” Lionel explained. “It wasn’t really important what I wanted it to be, it was important what Graham wanted it to be and that was what enabled me to make some progress early on.

“Graham had very strong ideas about things and he wanted things done in a certain way. It would have been foolish for me to try to dictate to him how it should be.”

Around four years after Lionel, who has written several books on the Hornets and founded the popular Tales from the Vicarage series, first raised the prospect of helping the former England manager to write his autobiography - and following some initial interview sessions in the autumn of 2014 - they started a series of trips to places around the country that had been significant in Graham’s life.

“It was a real privilege and it’s difficult now that Graham’s passed away not to imbue those days with greater significance than they had at the time,” Lionel said. “You realise we were in Scunthorpe and Grimsby and Lincoln in December 2014 and in the Midlands and Watford, it’s difficult to not look at those now from the perspective that sadly Graham passed away. But at the time it was an absolute privilege and it was a chance to get to know Graham on a different level.

“We all think we knew who Graham Taylor was, we all knew he was a family man, we all knew his passion for football, we all knew the things that got him agitated and worked up and passionate, but to go and get the chance to spend enough time with him to really get to know Graham as a person was an absolute privilege and I’m so grateful and lucky that I managed to do that. And to do that with a purpose of putting together his book and hearing his stories actually at the places where some of things happened, it certainly brought everything to life for me.

“As it was always going to be my job to try and convey and capture Graham’s personality on the page, it was incredibly valuable as well. You soak up so much without realising it. The way Graham speaks, the way Graham expresses himself, it is quite particular and I wanted to capture as much of that as I possibly could.”

Watford Observer:

Graham Taylor during his time as Aston Villa manager. Picture: Action Images

Anyone who was fortunate to spend time with Graham will know how easy it was to get caught up – and often entertained – by his views, reflections and anecdotes. Imagine, therefore, the task of conducting numerous interviews and conversations and turning them into a book.

“It was really difficult,” Lionel admitted. “I couldn’t count how many hours of tape I’ve got from our conversations and then on top of that meetings where the tape recorder wasn’t running but we were chatting over lunch or whatever.

“I was trying to be ordered and disciplined throughout the whole process, so I would meet Graham, we’d maybe talk for three or four hours and I’d spend the next day transcribing that and trying to compartmentalise it.

“It was impossible with Graham to say ‘right, today we’re going to talk about the England job’. Because he saw his life in the whole, he would relate things back to earlier events and you’d go off at tangents and there really wasn’t any point in trying to impose a structure on Graham. It was a case of ‘I’ve got some stuff there, I need to go back to that subject at another point’.”

Admitting it was “incredibly daunting” at first, Lionel started writing the book at the start of summer 2016 and was able to deliver 40,000 to 50,000 words before Christmas.

“[These] got a tentative thumbs up,” Lionel continued, “Then Graham died and it felt like starting again, not because the material in the book changed but because the reader would know the book was being published posthumously “I had to resist the kind of temptation that I was tying the ribbon and completing the story because that wasn’t what I was doing, so I had to go back to basics really.

“I had some help from some first-class people, [former Watford Observer colleague] Simon Ricketts being one. He was my first-team coach the whole way through the process. I’d send him bits, sometimes 500 words at a time, and he was ‘yes, keep going, we’re on the right track, this sounds like Graham, this doesn’t sound like Graham.”

Lionel is also grateful for the assistance he received from Charlotte Atyeo, a former long-serving sports publisher with Bloomsbury Publishing, who has “worked on a lot of successful books and helped and guided without stifling me in any way”.

Prior to Graham’s death in January, aged 72, Lionel had been seeing him on a weekly basis in the run-up to Christmas “going over things and chatting and had probably written half of the first draft. I’d written way, way more but in terms of what was presented to Graham and the rest of the family before Christmas, probably about half and the rest of it was in an uncompleted state.

“But when Graham died, I wasn’t sure whether the family would want to proceed. I didn’t think they would say we don’t want to do it because it had been so important to Graham while he was alive, it was something I think he’d enjoyed working on - Rita said he enjoyed the meetings, he enjoyed knowing the book was coming together – but I couldn’t take that for granted.

“But it changed, in a way it became more linear. I felt much less pressure to introduce writing tricks if you like. There was no need to be clever, there was no need to be anything other than Graham Taylor’s words as faithfully as they could be reproduced.”

Reflecting on working so closely with the man who led the Hornets to their highest-ever league position, into Europe and to their sole FA Cup Final appearance and the process of writing the book, Lionel said: “Graham was very important to a lot of Watford supporters, he was very well thought of everywhere he worked because of the way he worked, the person he was and the values he held and of course the football teams he created.

“Even with the England job, that was the most difficult part in some ways because the hurt never left him. He was never bitter in the sense he didn’t hold grudges. He wanted to say his piece about what he thought the England job was all about and he has done that, but he wasn’t bitter about it.

“So capturing that and really resisting the urge to kind of score points on his behalf, whether he was still alive or not, there would have been that temptation there for me but I had to stick faithfully to what Graham said absolutely. In that sense I feel a great responsibility as well as privilege because I didn’t want to get it wrong. It’s the story of Graham’s life and career the way he wanted it.

“From my point of view it’s been a project that’s been a challenging one, but it’s been one that I’m so glad and so proud to have been able to do.”

Graham Taylor: In His Own Words, with a foreword by Elton John, will be published on Thursday in hardback, priced £19.99.