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

Taylor and Clough – for at this stage Taylor was, very briefly, the senior partner – were united by four things: a working-class background, a passion for the game and an unshakeable conviction about the style in which it ought to be played, a dislike of authority and obsequious behaviour (except towards them) and, most significantly, the shared belief that Clough was supremely talented.

Taylor saw in Clough much more than the predatory instincts required of a goalscorer. He instantly registered, in that computer-like brain of his, Clough’s good positioning, his skill both on and off the ball, and his ability to strike it exceptionally hard with a minimum of backlift. Scoring unexpectedly with shots from the edge of the box and beyond came to him so easily. ‘He could launch rockets,’ Taylor told me.

Clough went through his footballing adolescence at Middlesbrough, where life was plotted on a graph of struggle versus hardship. Looking back, Clough saw that period in soft focus, and, after his dreadful falling-out with Taylor, in a forgiving light.

More than a year after the sadness of Taylor’s abrupt death in October 1990, but with the shock of it still evident in his voice, Clough sat in the chairman’s room at the City Ground and reminisced about what life had been like for both of them in a tough town in the North-East. He was drinking a pot of tea and had ordered a round of sandwiches. There were only the two of us in the room, which had low, orange leather seating on opposite walls and a drinks cabinet. The furniture design belonged to the 1960s. Outside, I could hear fans talking to one another in the car park as the autumn skies darkened. When the sandwiches arrived, cellophane-wrapped on a silver tray, there were enough for six people.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Clough. ‘We could have fed Middlesbrough in the 1950s on that lot.’ It was if the phrase ‘Middlesbrough in the 1950s’ was enough to transport him back there. Clough removed the cellophane, took a sandwich in each hand and gestured to me to do the same. He perched himself on the edge of his seat, and began to talk. Although I was sitting directly across from him, he didn’t look at me.

‘We had nowt back then – except a belief in ourselves,’ he said. ‘No money, no car. A trip to the pictures was the social event of the week. A new coat was a major investment. I could barely scrape together the money for one.’

He saw men who had slaved for decades at the same factory become bent and worn down by the daily grind of work. He appreciated how fortunate he was to be a footballer and not trapped in a numbing and mundane occupation. He appreciated as well how much football meant to the people who came to watch him – ‘all of ’em wanting to be you’.

On Saturdays, he said, the same men would go to the match, then head for ‘the boozer’, and afterwards pick up fish and chips on the way home. ‘If they could manage it, there was probably a bit of rolling around on the bed with the wife and then snoring for ten hours,’ he added.

Middlesbrough in the 1950s was the archetypal working-class town. But as nostalgia gripped him, Clough began to call it ‘our golden time’, the years in which everything and anything seemed possible for him and Taylor.

‘When you’re young and daft and big-headed like I was,’ he said, ‘you don’t mind going through a few tough times because you know, deep inside yourself, that you’re going to make it. That’s how I felt – and then I found that Pete thought so too. You didn’t normally find pearls in Middlesbrough. I did, the day when I met Pete for the first time.’

Clough and I kept eating, but the heap of sandwiches didn’t shrink much. As he poured both of us a beer in long glasses, he described Taylor’s unflinching support after many of Middlesbrough’s first team had signed a petition against the decision to make Clough captain at twenty-three. He remembered Taylor’s strength and resolve on his behalf during the rebellion when there was ‘nowt in it for him – except friendship’. He also remembered going regularly to Taylor’s home, which he used as a refuge cum safe haven. He told me he felt comfortable there. ‘It was one of the few places I could totally relax – away from absolutely everything. I could say what I liked. At home (Clough was still living with his parents) you still minded your p’s and q’s.’

Clough began to shake his head, as if trying to stir a memory he had long ago forgotten. After a pause, he said that he was thinking whether anything, such as winning the Championship or the European Cup, had ever come close to the exhilaration he had felt at making his way in the world, and the sense of expectation he and Taylor experienced at Middlesbrough. ‘If only we could go back,’ he mused, ‘relive it … see the way things used to be, we’d be more grateful for what we’ve got now. I know one thing: we’d never have fallen out.’

I believe that Clough was drawn back into the past because the present was getting too uncomfortable for him to contemplate – Forest were now sinking towards relegation. Having spent a decade forcefully pointing out that he could survive and prosper on his own, and arguing that Taylor, a racing buff, wasted too much of his time studying form in the Sporting Life, Clough began to recant. The man he had regularly referred to tersely as ‘Taylor’, as though the word itself might choke him unless he spat it out quickly, was now always ‘Pete’. No longer was Taylor a ‘lazy bugger’ who ‘didn’t pull his weight’ and sloped off home early or went to the races rather than scouting for talent or watching the opposition. Instead of talking purely about himself, he began to use phrases such as ‘the two of us’ and ‘what we did together’ and ‘our teamwork’.

By this time, of course, Clough’s managerial career was beginning to slip away from him, and just as it had when Taylor died, the important role his former partner played now assumed a greater significance. Clough was always bluntly honest with me about what attracted him to Taylor: hardly anyone else believed in him. ‘At first Middlesbrough thought I was crap – too mouthy, too awkward. The club used that as an excuse not to see what I could do on the pitch. I was too much bother for them. When you’re being ignored or dismissed, and then you hear someone singing a song about you somewhere in the far distance, the way Pete did about me, you want to hear it.’

Clough and Taylor became inseparable, and the talk between them was constantly about football: tactics, teams, players, coaching methods. As a management duo they tolerated various barbed sobriquets: The Kray Twins, The Blood Brothers, The Brothers Grim. But at Middlesbrough, Clough and Taylor were just friends obsessed with football. Taylor told Clough that there were things he had to learn about the game, and about life. ‘Nothing separated us in those early days – it was the closest we ever came as friends,’ said Clough.

Like a professor escorting a student on a field trip, Taylor led him to matches where the two of them stood behind one of the goals to study tactics and pass judgement on other players, deciding who could play and who couldn’t. When other professionals might be out ‘boozing it or birding it’, as Clough put it, or sitting in card schools to make a ‘few bob’, Clough and Taylor would be ‘sitting in Pete’s front room or in a café, pushing the salt and pepper round the table and talking about tactics.’

‘Hey, you’d be staggered at how many footballers aren’t interested in football,’ Clough told me. ‘You’d see them nip off to the snooker hall or to the bookies or just go home and lie on the sofa. That was never, ever our way. We were preparing ourselves for management even then.’

And that is why the third stage in their relationship, the marriage, took place. Like a lot of other marriages, there were long periods of happy-ever-after bliss and doting, loving respect; later came arguments, jealousy, envy and pernickety point-scoring, which led to separations and cold silences. Finally, there was the acrimonious divorce, an undignified squabble over what – among their trophy-winning legacy – belonged to whom, and the mutual feeling of hurt, damaged egos.

This was never a marriage of equals, and Taylor knew it. Clough was soon the dominant partner. Far more articulate, far more adept at promoting himself and far more comfortable in his own skin, he was consistently the more popular of the two of them – for journalists demanding quotes, for supporters wanting an idol, for other clubs in search of a coach or manager. In management it was always ‘Clough and Taylor’, never the other way round. Once Clough had begun his prolific goalscoring – he claimed 197 League goals in 213 matches for Middlesbrough, and another 54 in 61 for Sunderland – Taylor was locked into his crucial supportive and advisory role, and his salary never matched his partner’s.

However much Clough referred to him as ‘my mate’ and ‘my blood brother’, however much he described him in generous terms such as ‘I’m the shop window – he’s the goods at the back’, or ‘Pete’s the brains’, much of it, especially towards the end, was no more than an attempt to placate Taylor. Clough viewed himself as the head of the firm, and he wanted everyone else to recognise it.

While Clough was regularly the subject of newspaper and magazine profiles, and appeared on TV, Taylor stayed mostly in the background. On one occasion I was sitting with Taylor high in the stand watching a reserves match on a bitterly cold night when the was wind so strong that the roof shook. Taylor was wearing his scarf and flat cap, his raincoat collar pulled up round his neck. His alert eyes darted across the pitch. After every player had touched the ball at least once, Taylor delivered his clinical assessment of each of them: speed, positioning, best foot, weaknesses. It was a fascinating experience being with him and watching just how expertly he read the game.

Taylor didn’t want to live his life, like Clough’s, in a blaze of neon headlines. It discomforted him. He was all tics and facial expressions: a twist of the mouth, a widening of the eyes, an expansive hand gesture. When he was nervous or ill at ease, or just thoughtful, he would push his tongue into his cheek. He avoided crowds and was constantly nervous about being recognised. He didn’t like going into restaurants or pubs in case he was pestered. Sometimes I had to go inside first to discover how many tables were occupied.

I know he didn’t particularly enjoy confronting the knot of back-slapping supporters who waited for autographs outside the City Ground after matches. I saw him do anything to avoid it. Whereas Clough was fluent in small talk, Taylor found it difficult to communicate with strangers. I would listen to him struggle to find a casual line to begin a conversation.

The narcissistic streak in Clough was buttressed by his actorly expertise. He didn’t mind being gawped at or pointed out – in fact, he wanted it that way. Taylor preferred the company of his family and the people he knew. He liked solitary walks with his dog or a quiet day at the races. He did, however, expect credit when and where it was due.

Sometimes I think I grossly underestimated Taylor’s sensitivities. As a journalist, I knew that one quote from Clough was worth two of Taylor’s. I would often interview Taylor first, as insurance, and then hang around for Clough to garnish the story. Taylor once asked me, ‘Are my words not good enough for you?’ in a tone that suggested he knew the answer. He walked away shaking his head.

To see Clough and Taylor together, however, especially when both were in their pomp, was to witness two people of one mind. One would begin a sentence, the other finished it; one would espouse a theory, the other affirm it. One would attack or praise someone and the other took up the argument, splicing his thoughts into the narrative so seamlessly that it became impossible to disentangle their words.

At their most convivial, I imagined them as a polished comedy double act. But I could also picture them as good cop and bad cop, sharing a conspiratorial smile and interrogating their victim in a claustrophobic box of a room with a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

To look back over the partnership is to appreciate how the foundations of their management philosophy were laid in the bleakness of Middlesbrough and Hartlepool, built up at Derby, and topped out at Nottingham Forest. An unmistakable pattern emerges of the way teams and players were assessed, a stranglehold gained over the board of directors and publicity ingeniously garnered. In style and method, the Clough and Taylor at Hartlepool in 1965 were much the same as the Clough and Taylor who sat pitch-side at Munich’s Olympic Stadium fourteen years later watching Forest win the European Cup.

Simplicity was the heart of it, because the game itself was simpler then, far less sophisticated tactically. That is why Hartlepool, down in the Fourth Division, were managed exactly like Derby’s or Forest’s Championship winners.

Clough outlined to me how the two of them approached the job. Team talks were brief and uncomplicated. There were no thick dossiers on the opposition, no blackboards (or ‘black-bores’, as Clough called them), no diagrams to follow, no fretting about what tactics the other side might use. Those who could tackle were told to win the ball and pass it to ‘someone who can play –’ cos that’s yer job’. Everything was explained as if Clough and Taylor were teaching the rudiments of the alphabet. A ‘spine’ ran down the team – the best goalkeeper, centre half and centre forward the partnership could afford. The ball always had to be passed, never indiscriminately hoofed, and done without fuss – ‘linear’ and pure. There was an obsession with clean sheets, the words chanted like a religious mantra. The team had to be disciplined. ‘If you get booked, you’ll get a kick straight up the arse the second you’re within range of me,’ was Clough’s threat. He didn’t want crude cloggers, he wanted tacklers who won the ball so fiercely that no one would come near them for ninety minutes.

With Hartlepool, and later at Derby, Clough and Taylor methodically set about the task of rebuilding. Clough’s megaphone approach to publicity went alongside Taylor’s unobtrusive gathering of knowledge – observing the quirks and habits of players, scouting, and promptly recommending who might be bought, who should be sold. For Taylor it was a question of combining common sense with psychology to judge the mood of an individual or a specific situation and predict what would happen next. Players were psyched up or psyched out depending on the circumstances. ‘We goaded some, we built up others – everything was done to an instinctive plan,’ Clough told me. But mostly Clough would do what was least expected of him. If a player thought he was going to be praised, he would get a bollocking. If he thought he was going to get a bollocking, Clough would send his wife chocolates and flowers.

The partnership was based on need and faith. The keystone was that Taylor could – and regularly did – tell Clough when he was in the wrong, when he was close to overstepping the mark, or when he was in danger of making a horrendous spectacle of himself. Had Taylor been at Leeds to take the temperature of the club, I know Clough wouldn’t have blundered around like a novice, falling into traps of his own making. Had Taylor been around in Forest’s final season, when Clough was ruined by drink, his judgement shot, I’m convinced he would have ushered him into early retirement well before it became inevitable.

‘Pete’, said Clough, ‘was the only bloke who could stick an arm around my shoulder and tell me – straightforwardly, mate to mate – that I was wrong, or right, or to shut up and just get on with my job. When I rang him to say I’d got Hartlepool, and did he fancy it, we’d barely spoken for four years. We’d gone our different ways, taken separate paths out of necessity. We were football people, and, like the circus, sometimes you have to travel to scrape a living. But I knew I needed him. I knew we were right together.’

Clough and Taylor were not the first management team in the Football League. Matt Busby leant on Jimmy Murphy, Don Revie used Syd Owen as a sounding board, and Liverpool’s bootroom staff were the cabinet to Bill Shankly’s Prime Minister. But Clough and Taylor were the first to publicly formalise the arrangement and to make it clear, whatever the respective titles of manager and coach/assistant/trainer, that two men, not one, were running the club.

Taylor was like a protective skin for Clough. When Hartlepool recruited Clough, his playing career was over, and Sunderland – citing spurious financial difficulties – had already released him as youth coach. ‘I wasn’t at my best,’ he was frank enough to admit. He was ‘down’, and ‘there wasn’t much confidence left in the tank’.

Clough was afraid of a lot of things back then: ‘mostly’, he told me, ‘of failing, and of being labelled a failure, and of wondering how I would cope with it’. We were talking about a fear we shared. We were at Nottingham’s East Midlands Airport, waiting for a flight to be called, and he caught me taking a drink from a miniature gin bottle.

‘I don’t like flying,’ I confessed. ‘I’m petrified of it.’

‘I know how you feel, pal,’ he said, pointing at the bottle. ‘Let me have a swig.’ I was well aware of Clough’s anxiety about flying. He was always fidgety and nervous before boarding a plane.

He sat down beside me. ‘It’s not the most scary thing, though, is it? It’s whether you’ve got enough money to live on to feed your wife and bairns. Now that is scary … and I remember when …’ That’s when Clough’s time between Sunderland and Hartlepool flickered into the conversation. It deflected our thoughts away from the flight we were about to take. Witnessing my agitation over flying seemed to lessen Clough’s own apprehension about the journey. In trying to calm me down, he calmed himself down too, and we both felt better for it. Mind you, the gin helped.

I think about that now because, in much the same way, Taylor calmed Clough with his presence. Clough was asked in 1983 to name the chief influence on his career. ‘Me,’ he said, without hesitation. It was a flip answer to a searching question. In reality, he borrowed heavily from two men: Alan Brown (not to be confused with Clough’s predecessor at Forest, who spelt his name with a double l) and Harry Storer.

Storer had been manager at Coventry when Taylor played there as a goalkeeper. Under Taylor’s influence, Clough became Storer-like. There are two vignettes, which I heard recited time and again by Clough, which perfectly demonstrate the manner Storer adopted and why his players learned to expect the unexpected, the one-liner that might demolish them like a slap in the face.

After one game Storer had hauled a player back on to the pitch and shot him a question:

‘Where is it?’

‘Where’s what?’ the player asked, bemused.

‘The hole you disappeared into for ninety minutes,’ snapped Storer. ‘It has to be here somewhere.’

Storer once gave a trial to a trainee hairdresser. He pulled him aside afterwards and told him to sell his boots and buy another pair of scissors.

Clough gleaned from Storer nuggets of wisdom and followed them like commandments from the Old Testament:

Directors know nothing about football.

Directors never say thank you (no matter what you do for them).

Directors are essentially untrustworthy, so don’t make them your friends.