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

The vote was hardly any wonder. At his first team meeting, he told the players to ‘chuck your medals on the table –’ cos you won ’em by cheating.’ When I asked him about it, he was unrepentant: ‘Well, I meant it.’ Clough had to go, and go he did – with his pride punctured but with his wallet bulging.

Shortly after his sacking, I remember watching Clough being interviewed on TV alongside Revie. The hostility between them was lightning in the air; a decade of stored-up grievances added to the tension within the studio: Clough hated Revie, and Revie was appalled at what Clough had done in his brief tenure at Leeds.

Clough told me that he began to ‘hate’ Revie when he discovered him colluding with a referee after a match. Clough was convinced that Revie had ‘nobbled’ the referee. He had gone to watch Leeds and visited Revie in his office afterwards. He was standing behind the door, out of sight, when the referee tapped on it. Clough recalled: ‘I heard the ref say to Revie, “Was that all right for you, Mr Revie?” ’ Revie, Clough added, said a nervous ‘marvellous’ in reply and waved him away, like a lord dismissing his butler. He carried on talking to Clough as if nothing had happened. ‘There was something about it that told me the ref had been given something – and given Revie something in return,’ said Clough. ‘I knew Revie was bent.’

Clough won the TV contest comfortably on points, his mind too nimble for the ponderous Revie, who had neither the speed nor the wit to defend himself. He merely sounded ridiculous, and so protective of Leeds that you wondered why he had ever left them.

REVIE: Why did you come from Brighton to Leeds to take over when you criticised us so much and said we should be in the Second Division, and that we should do this and we should do that. Why did you take the job?

CLOUGH: Because I thought it was the best job in the country … I wanted to do something you hadn’t done … I want [ed] to win the League but I want [ed] to win it better than you.

REVIE: There is no way to win it better … We only lost four matches.

CLOUGH: Well, I could only lose three.

At that moment a question mark appeared across the folds of Revie’s face. He struggled to absorb the basic logic of what Clough had just said. A whole minute seemed to pass before the ordinary common sense of it dropped into Revie’s brain. He groped blindly for a half-adequate reply. The best he could offer was a tame smile and then: ‘No, no, no.’

The surge of relief Clough experienced when he banked Leeds’ money, and had recovered from what he regarded as the ‘trauma’ of his brutal treatment there, carried him through his first, bleakly depressing months at Forest. It was the seminal moment of his managerial career, which I always split into two: before the cheque from Leeds and after it.

I believe Leeds’ cash was more critical to his development than what happened to him on a frosty Boxing Day 1962 at Roker Park, when his playing career was abruptly ended in the last stride of a chase for a fifty-fifty ball. Clough slipped on the rock-hard pitch and slid into the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. Bone collided with bone. Clough broke his leg and snapped his cruciate ligaments. With twenty-four goals for Sunderland, he was then the leading scorer in all four Divisions.

In psychological terms, his forced retirement as a player – he was approaching twenty-seven when the injury occurred – is often cited simplistically as Clough’s turning point. It’s as if a player died and a manager was born in that moment, a career reignited by the rocket fuel of rage and injustice, a belief that he had something else to prove and needed to do it urgently. Irrespective of his injury, I’m sure Clough would have become a manager, and cast himself in the same opinionated, single-minded mould. That black Christmas merely sped up the process. But what management could never do was alleviate the crushing disappointment of unfulfilled potential.

One sunlit morning on a pre-season tour of Holland, I was standing with Clough as he watched a Forest training session. The players had finished their preliminary jogging exercises and had begun shooting at goal, the net billowing like a sail.

He began to reflect wistfully. ‘I’d give anything for one more season as a player, you know. If I could turn the clock back, that’s what I’d do. You never, ever lose the thrill of watching your own shot go past the goalkeeper, of putting on your boots and tying the laces, of feeling the studs press into the turf or hearing the sound of the ball as you hit it and watch it fly, like a golf shot. I try to tell ’em – every player I get – to enjoy every single minute of their career.’ Cos you never know when it might end, in less than a second. You only have to be unlucky once. Like me.’

I became convinced that Clough had a phobia about looking at players in plaster casts and on crutches. I could see him physically recoil from them, as if remembering his own experience. I asked him about it when we were drinking in a hotel one Friday evening. I’d drunk too much so I didn’t care. ‘I spent enough time on crutches to know that I never want to see a pair of them again,’ he replied, and ended the conversation as if he was shutting the lid of a box. I didn’t broach the issue again.

With Leeds’ cash, Clough became one of the first – and certainly the youngest – of any generation of managers to achieve, at a stroke, financial independence. He described it to me (though not on that first afternoon) as ‘fuck you’ money. ‘For the first time in my life, if I didn’t like anything that was going on I could turn around and say “Fuck you, I’m off”.’

Clough played in the days of club houses. These were residential properites owned by the clubs and rented to a player for a paltry amount. The house was handed back when the player moved on, retired, or, often calamitously, was released at the end of a season into an uncertain future. He played in the days of the maximum wage, not broken until 1961, when most players needed a trade as well, perhaps plastering or plumbing, and could hardly afford to run a car let alone buy one (Clough’s first weekly wage packet was £2.50; when he signed full-time he got £7.00). He played in the days when most of those who moved into management were almost as impecunious as their players, and lived as modestly as other working-class people.

I quickly discovered that he was obsessed with money, as if he feared he might wake up one morning and find himself a pauper again. He was always, I felt, trying to protect himself against the possibility of it happening. That’s why he took on so much media and advertising work. He would read out to me the salaries of other people – players, managers, pop and film stars, politicians – if he came across them in a newspaper. And he was constantly pushing for increases to his basic pay. I’m also certain that his fear of future poverty explains why he became embroiled in backhanders, or ‘bungs’. It wasn’t purely greed, but a form of self-protection against the dreadful insecurity he felt. Money was his armour-plating against life’s hardships.

I am sure it all stemmed from the ‘make do and mend’ of his upbringing. He came from a big family, with a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of clothes to wash. He was poor, working-class. You got an orange and a shiny new penny in your stocking at Christmas, and were grateful for it. ‘When you’re brought up like that, always fretting about paying the bills, it colours how you feel about life, the way you regard money, and how you view the importance of it as security,’ he said. ‘I found that the only people who aren’t obsessed with money are those who have got more than enough of it.’

But once he had ‘enough’, he gave a lot away, and did so without ever being showy about it. Sometimes he carried a fat wad of notes in the pocket of his tracksuit trousers. One lunchtime I was walking back with him from the Italian restaurant on Trent Bridge. In the City Ground’s car park we came across a father and son walking away from the ticket office. The son was about eleven years old. The knees of his black trousers were shiny, the shirt cuffs threadbare, and the toes of his shoes were scuffed from kicking a ball around the streets. His father, a tall, balding man in a worn grey suit, politely approached Clough for an autograph. His son, he explained, was desperate to watch a match. He’d saved his own pocket money from a newspaper round and odd jobs so he could buy the ticket himself. Clough shook him by the hand and then reached into his pocket. He drew out two £20 notes. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘stick these in your piggy bank.’ The boy could barely speak with gratitude. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ said Clough, and strolled off.

Even though, with Taylor, Clough had won the title at Derby in 1972, and made money from a considerable amount of TV work – also turning down an offer of £18,000 a year to work full-time for London Weekend Television in the early 1970s – he was never financially secure until Leeds’ six-figure gift. After that, he said, he was the ‘richest bloke in the dole queue.’ He felt as if he had won the football pools without filling in the coupon. ‘It was champagne instead of Tizer.’

All this came at a personal cost. At Leeds his ego took a battering. There were mornings when he woke up and thought, ‘Will I ever win another title, or get the chance to win one?’ and nights when he couldn’t sleep because he was turning over in his mind what had happened to him, what had gone wrong in a footballing sense and whether he could have changed anything.

So what Forest got in January 1975 was a chastened but maturely reflective Clough; less strident, and in not so much of a hurry.

Having thought about recruiting Clough after his resignation from Derby, Forest’s pusillanimous dithering two years earlier worked in his favour. ‘Everyone thought Taylor and I would go to Forest then – ‘cos it was on our doorstep, ‘cos the club was in the shit and ‘cos we were out of work. But they were too scared of us to do anything. Good thing too. I might have said yes, and then I’d never have had a cheque the size of a stately home from Leeds,’ he said, laughing loudly when I sat with him to write a piece about his tenth anniversary at Forest.

Apart from the geographical advantages the job offered, Nottingham being roughly twenty miles from Clough’s home in Derby, Forest were unappealing: a rusting tugboat of a club with leaks everywhere – thirteenth in the Second Division, with plenty of seats that hadn’t regularly seen a backside for years. The average gate was around 12,000, and Forest were sinking slowly under the unimaginative Allan Brown, who left sourly: ‘The board want Clough – good luck to them,’ were his parting words.

Brown was wrong. Not every member of the board hung out the bunting. The chairman, Jim Willmer, was unconvinced, chiefly because he was so worried about the new manager’s temper. With deliberate care, like someone wary that his own words might come back to bite him, Willmer called Clough ‘an energetic young man with an exciting background’. There is a photograph of Willmer shaking Clough’s hand on his arrival. A lopsided smile is fixed rigidly on the chairman’s face, as if drawn by an apprentice make-up artist.

Forest, like Clough, were terribly out of fashion. The club had won the FA Cup in 1959 under the avuncular Billy Walker, manager for twenty-one years. Jimmy Carey’s ‘fizz it about’ side – Ian Storey-Moore, Henry Newton, Terry Hennessey – narrowly lost out on the Championship in 1967 and were beaten in the FA Cup semi-final that same year. What followed was a downhill slither: relegation, disillusion, despair, and five managers in just over seven years – striking for a club which, priding itself on stability, had only employed three managers between 1939 and 1968. Apathy set in, and with it a tacit acceptance that each season was to be endured, and that Forest would again never compete successfully with Derby.

Clough at last brought light to the City Ground’s dark corners; a feeling that something good was on the way. I saved a cartoon that appeared in the Daily Express on the day of his appointment. It showed Clough walking on water. He is jauntily crossing the river beside the City Ground, his feet throwing up fingers of spray. The caption reads: ‘It’s ideal from where I live, it’s just down the River Trent and I’m at the Forest ground.’

He arrived, more prosaically, in another of Leeds’ generous parting gifts: a Mercedes. ‘I’ve left the human race and rejoined the rat race,’ he said provocatively, a smart line which also implied that signing his contract at Forest was an act of self-sacrifice rather than an escape from the stark isolation of unemployment. There was, very briefly, a mutual dependence between club and manager. For all his bullishness, Clough had to prove himself again and Forest risked falling through three Divisions if he failed.

The City Ground was just like the rest of football’s dilapidated architecture in the mid-1970s: a bank of unwelcoming, uncovered terracing at one end, a low, rattling tin roof for protection at the other. The East Stand had hard, wooden flat boards for seats, and the wind came off the Trent and swept through it like a scythe. Only the Main Stand, rebuilt after a fire in 1968, gave a slight nod to modernity.

Nottingham was a coal-mining county, slag heaps and skeletal headgears rising out of the clay earth to the north and south. The nearest coal mine was less than five miles from the City Ground (today it is mostly acres of empty grass), and my father worked in it. The National Coal Board advertisement in the Forest programme proclaimed: ‘Mining means business’. Raleigh still turned out bikes at its factory in Triumph Road, and Nottingham’s filigree lace was still among the finest in the world. The Thatcherite revolution, like Clough’s own, lay in the future. The daily news was dominated by stories about strikes and industrial action.

I bought every newspaper that I could afford. In the Daily Express, I read that Forest had sold £4,000 worth of season tickets in the first twelve days after Clough’s appointment. I read a piece in which he said ‘Hope is all I can offer,’ and meant it. I read the list of the players who had been sold, scattering Carey’s side across the First Division, and Clough’s response to it: ‘Forest collected £1m in transfer fees for them. But it’s been the £1m failure. There is only one thing in the club’s favour now. It’s got me.’

His first signing wasn’t a player. He sold a ghosted article to a national newspaper and bought a cooker with the money. ‘Well,’ he said, explaining himself, ‘the one the club had was knackered. But, frankly, I nearly picked it for the team ’cos it was better than most of the squad.’

I went to his first home League game, a 2–2 draw against Orient, wrapped in a parka. I didn’t support Forest. My father was obsessive about Newcastle, where I was born and then lived until we moved to Nottingham after his pit closed in the early 1960s. I was brought up on Milburn and Mitchell, and later, on Moncur and Macdonald. But Clough’s story was irresistible to me. I went to see the man rather than the team. I was just 16 years old, and squeezed myself in behind the goal at the old Bridgford End. In the crush of bodies, I could barely see over the top of the white perimeter wall. I heard the crowd’s reaction to Clough well before I spotted him, a pencil dot in the distance, as he waved like royalty to them.

Clough came to Forest alone. Taylor, who was born less than mile from the City Ground, was still in Brighton, uninterested in contributing towards the rehabilitation both of Forest and his former partner.

‘I knew it would be bad at Forest. I just didn’t know how awful,’ Clough admitted to me well after the Championship and two European Cups had been won. ‘Our training ground was about as attractive as Siberia in midwinter without your coat on, our training kit looked like something you got from the Oxfam shop. We barely had a player in the first team who I thought could play – or, at least, take us on a stage. I even had to teach one of them how to take a throw-in. I also had to teach them to dress smartly, take their hands out of their pockets and stop slouching. Early on, I thought I’d dropped a right bollock. To cap it all, I got pneumonia and spent a week or so in bed. I’m telling you, we could have been relegated in my first season. We were that close to it.’ He picked up a white sheet of paper and ran his finger along its edge. ‘We’d have almost deserved it too. We were useless.’

What saved Forest was Clough’s belief in himself, and the knowledge that failure again – while it would be personally and critically damaging – was never going to lead to the poorhouse. The money from Leeds enabled him to look at things with a surgeon’s exacting eye.

‘I was – though probably only Jimmy Gordon (Forest’s trainer, lured out of retirement) noticed it on a daily basis – more relaxed. I was a wee bit more subdued for a while – just a while, mind you – in what I said publicly.’

Clough said that when he got home at night after a ‘rotten’ day, he just had to look at his bank book to realise that he was fireproof. For the first time in management, he told me he actually showed a bit of patience. ‘I knew, if we just rolled up our sleeves and bought the right players, we’d be fine eventually.’

My first interview with Clough didn’t yield much. In fact, it was awful. Those questions I had so painstakingly typed out were just too predictable and naive.

As I spoke, he went to retrieve the squash ball and began bouncing it on the racquet again. When he got bored, he put the racquet down and began shuffling the papers on his desk. I wondered why he had agreed to do an interview with a teenager he had never met and for a newspaper he’d apparently never read.

I dutifully took down notes in my improvised shorthand and wrote up the piece back at the kitchen table among the scents and steam of a Sunday lunch. I retyped it a dozen times.

Clough declared he wanted to play entertainingly, called Peter Taylor ‘the best spotter of talent’ he had ever seen, and lamented Forest’s meagre gates because, he argued, ‘the people of Nottingham wanted [success] handed to them on a plate.’

As I left, he said: ‘Come back and see me soon, son. Have a Scotch next time. You’ll enjoy it.’

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

The shop window … and the goods at the back

Brian Clough and Peter Taylor were locked into a marriage and behaved like an eccentric married couple. That is a glib but accurate analogy for a relationship which, by the time of its slow collapse, had grown complex, bitter roots. From the moment the two of them met as players at Middlesbrough in the mid-1950s until their eventual divorce, their relationship would experience the ups and downs of any real marriage.

At first there was the cupid’s arrow of courtship: Taylor, older by almost seven years, let it be known around Middlesbrough’s training ground that Clough was in his eyes the best player at the club. He described him, in a voice loud enough for Clough to hear, as underrated and unappreciated.

Clough was the fourth-choice (sometimes fifth) centre forward in 1955. He was a young man with a crew cut and a sharp tongue, ostensibly self-assured, who rubbed up Middlesbrough’s management and dressing room the wrong way with his brazen and conceited approach. In Taylor, Clough found what he had been lacking: an ally, a kindred spirit and a teacher-cum-father-figure. Taylor found what he had been lacking too: Clough was a disciple to preach to, a one-man congregation prepared to listen to Taylor’s sermons on football.

Second came the ‘dating’, as Taylor broadened Clough’s footballing, social and even political education. Politics and social welfare were important subjects for Taylor. He was particularly conscious of the pay and conditions of the average working man, the distribution of wealth and a rigid class system that, amid the conformity of the 1950s, looked unbreakable to him unless a party of the left (not necessarily Labour) became capable of winning elections consistently. Taylor laid down his political credo to Clough. ‘He was slightly to the left of Labour in those days,’ said Clough. ‘Even Clem Attlee hadn’t been radical enough for him. He wanted the ship-builders to earn as much as the ship-owners. He thought the miners were treated like skivvies. He felt the steel-workers got a rough deal. He wanted the Tories out. The only thing we ever talked about, aside from football, was politics ‘cos we agreed on it.’ One Sunday afternoon Taylor took Clough to listen to the then Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson speak at a working man’s club in Middlesbrough. ‘You could hear the passion for change in what he said,’ Clough remembered. ‘We went back to Taylor’s house burning with it ourselves.’