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

‘Then you’d better come in,’ he said. He took a pace towards the pearl-glass door that led to his office, and then turned back to face me. ‘If you were a bit older, you could’ve had a Scotch with me.’

I stood up and smoothed down the front of my jacket, trying to look nonchalant.

I was eighteen years old, wearing the only suit that belonged to me – a pale grey check with matching waistcoat and lapels as wide as angel’s wings. That morning I had put on a white Panda collar shirt and a tie, carefully chosen from Burton’s the previous Christmas. I had carefully trimmed my beard, which I’d grown a year earlier to make myself look older. The beard seemed to confuse him – he kept staring at it. Did he think it was stuck to my chin with glue? I must have looked like a short, smartened-up version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

I was carrying a large black briefcase in which the night before I’d put a new spiral-bound notebook (‘The Reporter’s Notebook’), three ballpoints (in case two failed) and a page of typed questions I intended to ask. I had made the list a week before, sitting at the kitchen table in my parents’ council house, typing on the grey Imperial my mother had bought for me on weekly hire purchase from the Empire Stores catalogue. I kept making mistakes, and soon the floor was littered with screwed-up balls of discarded paper. I wrote in capitals so I didn’t have to press the shift key. The ribbon needed changing so some of the letters were faint. In the next room my father, soon to start the night shift at the coal mine, was listening to the six o’clock news: more gloom for the Callaghan government.

It was February 1977. Of course, football was very different then: unpolished and unpackaged, like the decade itself. There were no all-seater stadiums, no executive boxes serving canapés and chablis, few slick agents with sharp suits and blunt jaws. ‘Hey,’ Cloughie said years later, when we reflected on how even nondescript players now carried an agent around with them like a handbag. ‘The only agent back then was 007 – and he just shagged women, not entire football clubs.’

Watching football on TV was rationed: Match of the Day on Saturday night, Star Soccer or The Big Match Sunday lunchtime. Often a grim goalless draw was padded out to fill an hour. Newspapers were thinner and uniformly black and white. There were no dedicated pull-outs carrying the statistical minutiae, or gossip and quotes and graphics to record what had happened the previous Saturday when, observing strict tradition, almost every game had kicked off at three o’clock rather than being spread across a long weekend for the benefit of television. Most matches outside the First Division were hardly covered at all – except in the inky pages of countless Pink ’Uns, Green ’Uns and Buffs available in provincial towns and cities and in the late Saturday edition of London’s Evening News.

No national newspaper had properly cottoned on to football’s potential to sell copies for them. Sport was just a buffer to stop the advertisements tipping out of the back of the paper. In many papers, match reports were squeezed onto three, perhaps four, typographically unappealing pages – blocks of smudgy words set in hot metal type, indistinct black and white photographs and a headline font as out of fashion today as men’s platform shoes.

The newspaper I eventually joined, the Nottingham Evening Post, was a broadsheet. A red seal, in the shape of the city’s landmark, the Council House dome, sat alongside the masthead to denote the various editions of the paper printed throughout the day. The stop press column was full of the late racing results and, in summer, the cricket scores at lunch and tea.

The average weekly wage for a footballer was around £135. The average wage of the ordinary working man was less than £70. You could sit at a First Division match for £2.20 or go on the terraces, thick with cigarette smoke, for a pound or less. (If you did stand, there was always a risk, in such a very cramped space, that the man behind you might piss his lunchtime beer down the back of your legs). Forest’s matchday programme, like most others, cost 12p, and the back-page advertisement was usually for a cigarette company. ‘It’s Still the Tobacco that Counts’, claimed John Player.

That season, 1976/77, Chelsea’s future was clouded by precarious finances. The Greater London Council was urged to put together a rescue package for them. Sir Harold Thompson was elected as the new chairman of the Football Association, a decision that would have implications for Clough less than eighteen months later. Tommy Docherty called for hooligans to be birched. Don Revie, the England manager, appealed for more sponsorship in football. Laurie Cunningham became the first black player to be chosen for an England squad – in his case, the Under-21s. Arsenal paid £333,000 to bring Malcolm Macdonald to London from Newcastle.

By the end of that season, Liverpool had completed an exhausting but ultimately failed attempt to win a treble. The League and the European Cup were captured, but in between Liverpool lost the FA Cup final (when that competition was taken more seriously) to the club that was to achieve all three trophies in one season twenty-two years later, Manchester United.

Matches were played in ageing, dilapidated stadiums, and clubs thought silver service hospitality meant providing a clean gents toilet. The terraces were rough and uncovered. Other facilities – if you could find any – were appallingly primitive. The football itself was, by today’s standards, slower and intensely more physical: tackling back then was a legitimate form of grievous bodily harm. It was a miracle that the number of serious injuries wasn’t greater than it was.

But the games themselves were just as compelling, and the players remained part of, rather than apart from, the localised community of supporters who watched them. I’d see players supping pints in the same pubs and clubs as fans on Thursday and Saturday nights. Thursday was particularly popular for a beery midweek session because there was only a light day of training on Friday. Some players, especially in the lower divisions, travelled to home games on the bus.

Long before pasta became a culinary staple of the professional’s diet, footballers stuffed themselves on chips and well done steak for a pre-match meal and then gathered around the TV to watch On The Ball or Football Focus at lunchtime. Managers sat in dugouts wrapped in sheepskin coats and took training sessions wearing tightly fitting Umbro tracksuits. A few still smoked pipes.

Players didn’t look like advertising billboards. They wore shirts with nothing but a number and the club badge stitched to them: no sponsor’s name emblazoned on the front, no name decorating the back, no logo on the sleeve. Footballers’ wives were likely to be found in part-time jobs to bolster the household income. You might occasionally see a wife photographed, not in a glossy magazine or on the fashion or ‘celebrity’ pages of the Sunday tabloids, but in a football weekly. These dreadfully cheesy ‘at home’ shots usually captured the husband in the kitchen pretending to wash up or cook while his wife stood decoratively behind him. The player looked distinctly out of place, as if he’d needed a map and a compass to find his way to the kitchen.

Like workers on the factory floor, or down the pit, the players deferred to managers. In the best cap-doffing tradition, the manager was always the ‘boss’ or the ‘gaffer’, as if he was running a building site. I addressed Clough as ‘Mr’, as if he was the headmaster of my comprehensive school.

Inside Clough’s office, he sat me down in front of his vast desk, which was covered with mountains of paper. I laid my briefcase carefully on the floor. His glass-fronted bookcase held old copies of the Rothmans Football Yearbook, a black-spined history of mining and a picture atlas of the North-East. There was an empty kitbag in the corner of the room, a heap of training shoes and three squash rackets. An orange football lay behind the door next to a coat stand, on which Clough had hung a dark blazer. The only natural light came from a narrow window that ran the full length of the wall behind him and overlooked the back of the Main Stand.

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he said, disappearing along the corridor and reappearing a minute later with two goblets filled with orange juice. Of course, I didn’t suspect then that his own might be spiked with alcohol. He closed the door, and then sat down and picked up one of the squash rackets and a ball that lay beside it. He began bouncing the ball on the strings of the racket.

‘Now then, tell me again. Which paper do you work for, young man …?’

I told him that I was writing for the Nottingham Sport. It was a weekly A4-sized newspaper (now long deceased), cheaply produced and so impecunious that it was unable to pay most of its contributors. I was working voluntarily, I explained. I had ambitions to become a newspaperman. I added that for the previous six months I’d telephoned the scores through to Grandstand and World of Sport on behalf of the local freelance agency and listened as professional writers dictated copy at the final whistle.

‘So you want to be a journalist?’ he asked, still bouncing the ball on the head of the racket, and then not waiting for an answer. ‘I thought about being a journalist once – well, for about thirty seconds. Would have been brilliant at it too. Can’t type, though. Can’t spell either. Can you spell?’

I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I lied.

He plucked the squash ball out of the air. ‘And what does your dad do? Is he a journalist?’

‘He’s a miner,’ I replied.

‘Votes Labour?’ he asked.

‘Always,’ I said.

‘What about your mam?’

‘Works part-time.’

‘Any brothers or sisters?’

‘Just me.’

‘Where were you born?’

‘Newcastle.’

‘Do you like any other sport.’

‘Cricket.’

I wondered where all this was leading. Wasn’t I supposed to be asking the questions? My palms began to sweat. I dragged them across the knees of my trousers, praying he wouldn’t notice.

Clough dropped the squash racket and the ball and leaned forward, as if trying to get a closer look at me. The ball rolled off the edge of the desk and began to bounce towards the door. He pretended not to be bothered.

‘Ooh,’ he said, wagging his finger. ‘Now that’s a very good start with me young man … North-East, working background, cricket. I bet your mam has dinner on the table when you get back home. And I bet she cleans your shoes and makes sure you have an ironed shirt every morning.’

I nodded in agreement, ignorant then of how powerfully influential his own mother had been, how much his upbringing in part mirrored my own.

‘Go on then,’ he said, ‘ask me a question. You’ve got twenty minutes. And we’ve just wasted two of them.’ Clough leant back in the chair, plonked his feet on the corner of the desk and tucked his hands behind his head, as if he was settling down for a siesta.

I looked at him for a moment, half-expecting him to change his mind about speaking to me. He was just a few weeks short of his forty-second birthday, fit and vigorous. His hair was healthily thick and swept back, his face lean and virtually unlined, the eyes challenging and alive. That familiar piercing, nasal voice was an octave or two higher than it finally became; the result, of course, of being soaked in alcohol.

I put down my orange juice, fiddled inside my briefcase and brought out the thick new notebook. Staring at it, he said: ‘I’m not filling all that for you!’

What struck me most back then was Clough’s supreme confidence, as if he could actually see what lay ahead of him: the League championship and the European Cups and vindication. He had been through three and a half years of violent turbulence – a stupidly impetuous resignation at Derby, an ill-judged decision to manage Third Division Brighton, the forty-four days he spent nursing Don Revie’s dubious inheritance at Leeds and the early traumas at struggling Forest – but he was well over the worst of it when I met him. He was swimming with the current again, and back with Peter Taylor. Forest were fifth in the Second Division. Promotion was seventeen matches away.

The wilderness period changed him, he told me many times later. Each embarrassed step through it taught him career-altering lessons. After Derby he learnt that resigning on a whim led to remorse and regret. After Brighton he learnt to be more careful about his career choices, for going there had been as grievous a mistake as leaving Derby. But it was at Leeds that his most profound transformation took place. He learnt that he needed Taylor beside him, that his abrasive approach had to be tempered, and, crucially, that personal wealth – and a lot of it – was more important than ever. He made a financially jewelled exit, which he repeatedly claimed to me was worth almost £100,000 (the equivalent today of around £850,000). However much he got, the money was critical to the way he managed his career later on.

Whenever Leeds came up in conversation – even in the season before he retired from Forest – Clough never tired of talking about both the raw anger he felt towards them, for what he regarded as the spineless collapse of the board at the first sign of player revolt, and the size of the pay-off he had been given.

Why Clough accepted the offer to manage Leeds isn’t difficult to fathom. Brighton had high ambitions but low resources. The club was going nowhere. Achieving success for them, he said to me on more than one occasion, was ‘like asking Lester Pig-gott to win the Derby on a Skegness donkey’. The nadir was Brighton’s 4–0 defeat to the part-timers of Walton & Hersham in an FA Cup replay. ‘I lost to a team that sounded like a firm of solicitors,’ he moaned.

Clough had panicked after leaving Derby: ‘I had too much time to think – and not enough brain to think with’ was the line he always used. He missed the glitz of the First Division. When Leeds rang him after Revie’s predictable appointment as England manager, it was like dropping a rope ladder to a man adrift at sea. Of course, Clough snatched at it.

He abhorred Revie and regarded Leeds, then League champions, as insular and rotten. But there was a perverse attraction in managing the club he had remorselessly criticised for half a dozen years or more. He accused them of being cheats and charlatans, cursed them for their gamesmanship. But now he would teach them how football ought to be played. He would do what Revie could not, and in the process, gain his revenge over the club.

Why Leeds picked Clough is beyond comprehension. His rapid sacking confirmed their gross error in appointing him in the first place. It was possibly the most ludicrously misguided hiring of a manager ever made by a football club’s board of directors. Revie managed methodically. He compiled dossiers and thought intently about the intricacies of the opposition. Clough managed through gut instinct. He dismissed dossiers as frippery and did not think, let alone talk, about opposition strengths or weaknesses. Revie prepared everything for Leeds, from travel to pre-match meals. Clough prepared almost nothing at all. He liked to ‘wing it’, as he told me.

For Revie, the matter of his succession was as straightforward as ABC: Anyone But Clough. He suggested either Bobby Robson as an external candidate, or Johnny Giles from within the existing staff. In appointing Clough, the Leeds board voted for seismic upheaval rather than calm continuity. The new manager did everything wrong. The very worst traits of Clough’s personality – the arrogant swagger, the confrontational manner, the insouciant impatience – all came to the surface.

Clough was still on holiday in Majorca when the team reported back for pre-season training – his first mistake. He found the dressing room wildly suspicious of him and almost uniformly hostile. His meagre placatory efforts, such as a telegram to the captain Billy Bremner, were viewed as patronising. It got worse too: a Charity Shield sending off for Bremner, just four points from six League matches, a rushed decision to try to sell players – Terry Cooper, David Harvey and Trevor Cherry among them – and, at the end, what amounted to a vote of no confidence in him. ‘The players,’ he complained, ‘have more meetings than the union at Ford.’