Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough

However, it carried on for half a minute more, which for me was like an hour. Clough’s voice grew louder and I thought he might spontaneously combust. I was standing in the centre of the dressing room, pathetically limp and embarrassed, with my notebook redundant in my hand. I wanted the steam from the showers to descend like a fog and hide me. ‘You come into this club and we treat you like a friend,’ Clough raged. ‘And you fucking insult us. You know fuck all about this game. Fuck all. Don’t stand there, just fuck off!’

I exited – downcast, angry, silent, and feeling as though I had been scalded by a branding iron. As I walked the two and a quarter miles back to the office, I thought about his machine-gun use of the F-word. This was, after all, the man who had once tried to dissuade his own supporters from using bad language by erecting a sign at the City Ground that read ‘Gentleman, no swearing please’.

Two days later, on a Friday lunchtime when I ought to have been collecting team news, I was sitting at my desk trying to think if there was anything already in my notebook that I might turn into a readable story for the following night’s edition. The phone rang.

‘Where are you, shithouse?’ asked Clough. (He used the word ‘shithouse’ as frequently as other people use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. ‘It’s an affectionate term,’ he’d explain – though he didn’t always use it that way.)

‘Er, you banned me. You told me never to come back to the ground,’ I said, and heard in return a sigh of mock exasperation.

‘Fucking hell, fucking hell. Don’t be such a stupid bugger. Get your arse down here. I didn’t mean it. Spur of the moment thing. Gone and forgotten now. Come down and we’ll have a drink. I’ve a got a story for you. Fancy a glass of champagne?’

I paused. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Provided you don’t kiss me.’

‘You’re too fucking ugly for that,’ he said, and slammed the phone down.

He was waiting for me at the door. ‘There’s a Scotch for you,’ he said. ‘Get it down you and I’ll fetch the champagne.’

I stayed well into the late autumn afternoon and left hopelessly drunk on Bell’s Whisky. We never got to the champagne. My notebook was choked with stories.

Of course, no football reporter knows everything. A fair amount of what he writes is largely intelligent guesswork, a decent stab at trying to understand what is happening from the evidence – first hand or empirical – that he has gathered from various sources. Clough, being Clough, took a different view.

‘If you’re going to work with me, and we’re going to build a relationship, I’ll tell you the lot,’ he said at the beginning, which was a blatant untruth. What he meant was that I would be told 90 per cent of what was going on 85 per cent of the time – but that wasn’t a bad return.

And so it began, an extraordinary journey with a contradictory, Chinese box of a man – idiosyncratic, eccentric, wholly unpredictable from one blink of an eye to the next, and unfathomably difficult to burrow to the core of. I saw him at his very best and at his very worst.

On the one hand, Clough was capable of being unforgivably rude, unnecessarily cruel, appallingly bombastic and arrogant, and so downright awkward that I wanted to drop something large and heavy on his big head. On the other hand, he could be extravagantly generous, emollient and warm, ridiculously kind, and loyal to whoever he thought warranted it, and he often went out of his way to be no bother to anybody. Ken Smales, Forest’s secretary, said that Clough could be like a sheep in wolf ’s clothing or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but that ‘mostly he was just himself’, a description which perfectly encapsulated my problem in the minute or two before our daily meetings: which Brian Clough was going to turn up?

Flowers were sent as routinely as other people posted greetings cards. Friends found gambling debts, mortgage arrears and bills paid anonymously. Even strangers, if he got to hear about their plight and regarded it as unjust, might find themselves bailed out of financial difficulty. He did it quietly and on the strict understanding that there would be no publicity involved.

I stammered, sometimes badly. One morning, forcing out a question took me longer than usual. ‘Young man,’ he said impatiently, ‘do you stammer with me, or do you stammer with everyone?’ I told him boldly, and with no hesitation in my voice, that he shouldn’t feel privileged because I stammered to all and sundry. ‘What’s the cure?’ he asked. I said there wasn’t one; once a stammerer, nearly always a stammerer. He pressed on: ‘When do you stammer the most?’ I said that talking on the phone was always difficult because you couldn’t use the natural pauses that punctuate face-to-face conversation to your advantage. ‘I’ll phone you every day for two weeks,’ he said. ‘We’ll crack this.’ He almost kept to his word. My stammer didn’t vanish, but it gradually became less severe.

When he was at his worst, and especially when drinking brought out the darker side of his personality, covering Forest was like being ordered around at gunpoint. All the same, I followed Clough with the growing astonishment that Boswell must have felt walking with Johnson across the Western Isles. What Boswell said about Johnson also fitted Clough to a tee: he had ‘a great ambition to excel’, and a ‘jealous independence of spirit, and impetuosity of temper’. Not much, he did.

Looking back, and putting what I saw into context, Clough’s eighteen years at the City Ground was a period of madness punctuated by wonderful bursts of sanity. I don’t know how I survived it without (a) becoming an alcoholic or (b) being confined to a padded cell at some point.

Since the spit and polish of Sky TV reinvented the game, everyone has a team to support, colours to wear, a result to search for on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. Everyone is suddenly an expert too, from the strategy of 4–4–2 and the sweeper system to set pieces and diagonal runs from ‘the hole.’ It wasn’t always like that. Given today’s obsession with football, and the way it is anchored in social and cultural life, it can be difficult to imagine what the game was like before the convulsions of the 1990s turned it into a designer sport.

In the 1970s, when hooliganism ran across it like a ghastly scar, football wasn’t just out of kilter with fashion. It was regarded as faintly repellent, like a sour smell, by most of those who never passed through the turnstiles. I knew a lot of people who genuinely believed that the scene before a typical Saturday afternoon game resembled Lowry’s melancholic painting Going to the Match: dark, whippet-thin fans in flat caps and mufflers, bent into a slicing wind, and the skyline around each ground smudged by smoke from factory chimneys. Football to them was crude, a prehistoric pastime, and redolent of a distant past featuring dubbin, cheap liniment and steel-toecapped boots. Even by the 1980s, when the implications of the tragedies at Heysel, Bradford and Hillsborough were absorbed and football began to look at itself afresh, it was still a struggle to weld together a convincing argument for its future health.

In each decade Clough significantly promoted football through the strength of his personality; as a character instantly recognisable to those who didn’t habitually watch the game. He was a guest on Parkinson. Mike Yarwood impersonated him with a jabbing finger and a ‘now young man, listen to me’ routine, which Clough found immensely flattering. ‘True fame is when the newspapers spell your name right in Karachi – and ordinary fame is when Yarwood does you,’ he once told me. ‘Yarwood did me a favour. He made me popular. He advanced my cause.’

Clough was so skilled at self-promotion that I felt he didn’t need anyone to beat a drum on his behalf. TV and newspapers adored him because you seldom had to look underneath his words to find the hidden meaning (though the motive was often of labyrinthine complexity). Each sentence was plain and pointed, like a spear. He didn’t rely on qualifying terms such as ‘perhaps’ or ‘might’ or ‘maybe’. He didn’t dissolve into banality. He hated yawning politeness, and didn’t mind being portrayed as a snarling malcontent.

A sport’s back-page lead, aimed primarily at a popular audience, is necessarily limited in scope. My own pieces tended for obvious reasons to be variations on a single theme: Clough’s opinions. He sold newspapers. I would sit at the keyboard and write: ‘Brian Clough today …’ and then press on with the guts of the story.

Every day on the back of the Nottingham Evening Post, Clough ‘demanded’ or ‘insisted’ or ‘attacked’ or ‘appealed’ or (less often) ‘made a plea’ or ‘sent a message’ to someone or other. The quotes justifying the first paragraph began to run from the third. The rest was as straightforward as joining the dots in a child’s puzzle book. The basic principle was to make sure his name appeared in the intro because, as Hollywood says, the lead always gets the close-up.

Good quotes are the diamonds of popular journalism, and Clough represented the richest and the deepest seam. He was an inexhaustible mine of one-liners. He took pride in being an agitator, and gratuitously provocative. He didn’t care – at least not very much – about the way he was perceived, whether or not anyone liked him or how his opinions would play politically, except, naturally, when it suited his own agenda. It meant that enemies gathered in battalions, a fact Clough acknowledged sanguinely.

‘That bunch of shithouses at the Football Association – who know nowt – want me to shut up,’ he said from behind his cluttered desk, showing me a letter with the FA’s embossed shield on it. The FA had written to admonish him for a comment he had made about wanting to ‘kick’ one of his own players. ‘Let’s you and me write a piece and tell them to fuck off – in the nicest possible way. You’ll pick the right words … Make it up for me.’ He trusted you to do your job the way he trusted a player on a Saturday afternoon. If you didn’t shape up … well, a bollocking followed.

Stories about his epic drinking, the rages like forked lightning, and the ‘bungs’ are draped like a black cape across the sad last acts of his career. But a man’s life has to be seen in the full to appreciate it. He shouldn’t be judged on the last flickerings of the candle. The good years were pure gravy for Clough, filled with silverware and respect, and not purely because his name was there in the record books as having won the League Championship and European Cup twice apiece. His legacy went beyond the business of winning trophies.

When Clough became a manager at Hartlepool in 1965, aged only thirty, his contemporaries were predominantly conventional figures with a 1940s or 1950s ideology. Most were middleaged or approaching it and maintained a staid, regulation collar-and-tie approach to football. Clough was iconoclastic. Very early on he recognised the value of publicity and how to make it work for him. He had the loudest voice, the magnetic pull of the fairground barker and an understanding of how the mechanics of the media functioned. He knew how to exploit it for himself.

As a player at Middlesbrough, Clough had deliberately leaked his dissatisfaction with the club’s attitude towards him so that he could gain the upper hand in the struggle to either force a transfer or improve his salary. He was eventually sold. As a manager, with Peter Taylor, he had the prescience to realise that two men, personally compatible but with contrasting talents, could do the manager’s job better than one. He pioneered the idea of a short break mid-season for the team, and proved himself innovative in his handling of players and in his approach to coaching.

Clough was also lucky. His break into management came at the time when television began to embrace football more firmly, chiefly because of England’s World Cup win in 1966. He eventually became emblematic of the period when managers began to dominate the headlines as much as, if not more than, players – and he was one of the main reasons why the cult of the manager developed in the way it did. Clough made sure that he – not the players, and certainly not the chairman who bankrolled it – was the axis on which the club always turned. Open dissent against someone or something, or merely going against the grain, pushed him to centre stage. The strategy of yelling his contempt and kicking up dust whenever he could for the sake of it proved profitable. Clough soon became more important than whichever team he managed, and then more important than the club itself. Profile was everything to him because it was accompanied by power.

As a manager, Clough enjoyed the advantage of relative youth, which helped him to glamorise management in the late 1960s and early 1970s and give it an almost film-star sheen. When he secured promotion to the First Division for Derby in 1969, he was thirty-four years old. His contemporaries were ancient by comparison. Joe Mercer (Manchester City) was fifty-five. Bill Shankly (Liverpool) was fifty-four, and Bertie Mee (Arsenal) and Joe Harvey (Newcastle) were both fifty-one. Bill Nicholson (Tottenham) and Harry Catterick (Everton) were fifty. Don Revie was forty-two, but looked ten years older; perhaps it was the pressure of managing Leeds. When Clough took Forest into the First Division eight years later, all but one of those managers (Revie) had retired.

Clough didn’t merely represent the start of a new generation, he shaped it too. In the early 1980s, after Forest’s two European Cup wins, the lower divisions seemed to me to be awash with Clough clones. I met one who came to the City Ground in the manner of a pilgrim worshipping at a shrine. He looked like a very bad insomniac, gaunt and hollow-eyed with a putty-coloured complexion. As I listened to him talk about discipline, as though a big stick was enough to guarantee quivering obedience, I realised how badly he wanted to be Clough, but what was also clear was his utter failure to appreciate the people skills of the man he venerated. He had, perhaps unknowingly, begun to imitate some of Clough’s gestures, and the inflections in his voice and a few of his expressions had infiltrated his vocabulary. I thought of the old line about one Shakespeare and many Hamlets.

Clough got some things horribly wrong. His fear that live TV would soon kill football was quickly discredited. His criticism of successive England managers stemmed from the suppurating wounds that the Football Association inflicted on him. No one, he felt, could do a better job with England than the face he saw every morning in the shaving mirror. His criticism of players and other managers was frequently unfair.

But another thing about him, and a major reason to admire the man, was his refreshing philosophy about how the game ought to be approached. Style mattered, and Clough fell into the category of high-minded aesthetician. It wasn’t enough to win – he wanted to win playing beautiful football. He wanted the ball passed elegantly, as if it were on a thread, from player to player, preferring creative intuition to brute force. He demanded style as well as discipline.

As Clough saw it, teams who played the long ball were horned devils. He said to me: ‘Any idiot can coach a group of players to whack the ball as hard and as high as possible, and then gallop after it. Give me time, and I could train a monkey to do that and stick it in the circus. What pleasure does anyone get watching a side like that? You may as well go plane spotting at Heathrow –’ cos you’d find yourself staring at the sky all the time, and then you’d go home with a stiff neck.’ When he talked that way, his eyes became flinty, and the skin around his mouth tightened into a snarl. He would jab out his right hand, like a southpaw sparring in the gym.

The game, Clough argued idealistically, was simple. He would lay a towel on the floor of the dressing room and place a ball at the centre of it, striving to make a mental symbol of it take hold in a player’s mind. ‘This ball is your best friend,’ he would say. ‘Love it, caress it.’ He preached the simplicity of football with the passion of a TV evangelist. The game, he said, is ‘the most straightforward on God’s earth – beautiful grass, a ball, a defined space in which to play it.’

Clough believed that everything in life was overcomplicated and that most coaches were guilty of overcomplicating football, as if it were ‘something like nuclear physics and Einstein had written a book about it’. A pained expression crossed his face whenever he heard coaches talk about ‘systems’ or saw chalk lines scratched on the blackboard. He looked at ‘Subutteo men being pushed around a felt pitch’ with disgust. ‘Get the ball,’ he said. ‘Give it to your mate or try to go past someone. Score a goal. Make the people watching you feel as if there’s been some skill, some flair in what you’ve done.’

Near the end of what was to become his penultimate season in 1992, I was walking back from the training ground with him. We talked about football as entertainment. ‘You know why so many people queue up for hours to look at the Mona Lisa?’ he asked, all ready to roll out his own answer. ‘’Cos it’s an attractive piece of work. It moves them. They feel the same way about a beautiful woman, like Marilyn Monroe. They feel the same way about a statue or a building. They even feel the same way about a sunrise. Now if we’re half as good-looking as a football team as Mona, Marilyn or a sunrise, then we might get one or two people prepared to come and see us every Saturday – even if it’s pissing down.’

No team, Clough believed, could claim to be ascetically superior if a streak of ill-discipline or a tendency to wantonly bend the rules ran through it. That, he said, is why he so ‘hated’ Revie’s Leeds.

On a Friday he had a habit of writing out his team sheet to the accompaniment of a Frank Sinatra record. A ‘gramophone player’ (he never referred to a ‘record’ or ‘tape deck’) sat on the low glass-fronted bookcase in his office. A drawing of Sinatra hung on the wall. He would sometimes spend a long time hunting for his reading glasses before beginning the painstaking process of putting down each name in large capital letters.

‘You know,’ he said one day, handing me the team sheet, ‘I’d love all of us to play football the way Frank Sinatra sings … all that richness in the sound, and every word perfect. How gorgeous would that be?’ His face glowed like a fire, and he began to sing along with Sinatra, always a word ahead of him, as if he needed to prove that he knew the lyrics. ‘I’ve got you…under my skin …’ He rose from his chair, still singing, and began to pretend he was dancing with his wife. When the song finished, he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. He fell back into his chair, arms and legs splayed.

The smile looked as if it might stay on his face for ever. ‘Oh, that was good,’ he said. ‘Blow me, if only football could be that much fun …’

CHAPTER ONE (#u8633d1dd-e9b9-5ac8-816d-1b2729bdab67)

Who the fuck are you?

The first words Brian Clough ever said to me were: ‘So who the fuck are you then?’

He asked the question in a perplexed rather than an aggressive way, breaking the cold silence of a late winter afternoon. I was sitting in the corridor outside his office, the grey carpeted floor dull and dirty, the cream-coloured walls in need of paint. A queasy apprehension filled my stomach. Clough lowered his head and peered at me, as if looking over the frames of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

‘I’m here,’ I said slowly, and managing not to stammer, ‘for the interview you promised me. I’ve brought my letter.’

I took the folded letter from my inside pocket and offered it to him as if it was an engraved invitation, my outstretched arm hanging stiffly in the air. Clough was wearing a sun-bright rugby shirt. His eyes narrowed, his brow creasing slightly.

‘Which paper?’ he asked, this time making the question sound like part of an interrogation.

‘Nottingham S-s-s-sport,’ I replied, betraying the stammer. The ‘S’ sound came out in a low hiss, like air from a bicycle tyre.