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

Buy players who show courage.

Taylor also took away a rich inheritance from Storer. Like Storer, Taylor’s antennae learnt to pick up tell-tale psychological signs about players. He would notice the way someone walked or carried his bag, or sat on the bench beneath his kit-peg, or offered a throwaway, apparently trivial comment as he came in. Nothing, Clough maintained, was innocent or meaningless to Taylor. The nuance of everything mattered. It was as if, he added, the man had X-ray vision. ‘He was brilliant at it,’ said Clough. ‘It was almost as if he could read minds. He’d nudge me and say, ‘So and so needs picking up – can’t you see the droop of his shoulders?’ Or, ‘That bloke is too cocky by half. He needs yanking down a peg or two.’ Or even, ‘I think it’s time we gave the lad over there a day off.’ He could twig a group of players at fifty paces, who had guts and who didn’t, just by looking at them.

In Storer and Alan Brown, the manager who bought him for Sunderland, Clough saw managers who circumnavigated directors by running the club themselves as much as possible, and he imitated them. Brown’s influence on Clough was particularly deep. Brown was tough and implacably strict. He created his own set of uncompromising rules governing conduct off and on the pitch, and the squad obeyed or suffered; in just the same way, Clough made his players meekly comply to his own rules. Players had to be smart, polite and obedient. Hair had to be short, preferably like an army crew cut.

There were times throughout his management career, said Clough, when he ‘wished Alan Brown was beside me … I’d have got a straight answer to any question – and it would have been the right one too. I know a lot of managers who have been kind enough to say I influenced them. Well, Alan Brown influenced me because I respected him so much. And he scared me half to death. You didn’t want to be on the end of one of his bollockings. The first thing he ever said to me was, “You may have heard that I’m a bastard … well, they’re right.” And yes, he could be. But he was a brilliant one.’

There is no secret to running a club, argued Clough, as though it was obvious to anyone. Brown had shown him the way. It was Brown who forced the Sunderland first team to act as ball boys for the youth side. It was Brown who yanked Clough, on his first day at Sunderland, off the touchline of the training pitch for talking to a friend and publicly dressed him down for it, like a schoolboy caught with matches in his pocket. It was Brown who made him brew the tea. What Brown did at Sunderland, Clough incorporated into own his management style. For him, Brown was the coaching book, the manager’s ‘how to’ manual, and each page glittered with good sense. In essence, he made things simple.

At Hartlepool, ‘the cupboard was financially bare’, with ‘not a scrag end in it’. So parlous was the club’s financial state that Brown, who had moved on to manage Sheffield Wednesday, gave Clough his squad’s cast-off training kit. Clough and Taylor had no option but to work on the very fabric of the club: painting and repairing the stands and doing odd jobs themselves. Clough got a licence to drive the team coach: a practical necessity, but also a valuable piece of publicity. He knew that headlines would lead to increased gates, and Clough’s natural bent was excess. There were other gimmicks. He worked for two months without pay (Taylor politely declined to match this act of self-sacrifice). He even loaned the club money from his own testimonial fund on the proviso that the identity of Hartlepool’s ‘mystery benefactor’ remained secret. It created yet another headline for the club.

The value of a proper, shared partnership became apparent, if only on a practical level. ‘Without Pete, the job would have been impossible,’ said Clough. ‘It would have been too much for one bloke. Blow me, I’d have been a wreck – just through the sheer exhaustion of what we had to do every day, covering leaks in the roof, covering leaks in the team, rattling the begging bowl wherever we went. We didn’t have time to stop for a piss …’

Their reward for driving themselves so relentlessly came in 1967: a job at Derby. Hartlepool were already on the brink of promotion, which was sufficient to back up Len Shackleton’s generous recommendation of Clough – the equivalent of a papal blessing – to Derby’s sceptical board. Shackleton, an ex-Sunderland and England player, had become a journalist with the Sunday People. He was revered not only as a player but also as an acute observer of the game. If Shackleton said something, you knew it was true. Almost as if he was Clough’s agent, Shackleton had been responsible for tipping off Hartlepool about him too. Clough was persuasive enough to impress Derby and, typically, he arm-twisted them to take on Taylor as well, albeit for much less money. Clough’s status was amply reflected in his salary of £5,000 compared with Taylor’s £2,500.

Derby made Clough and Taylor. What happened there – the renaissance of a small, inconsequential provincial club who went on to become League champions – was a lavish dress rehearsal for what was to follow at Nottingham Forest. Powered by the force of Clough’s charismatic will and Taylor’s shrewdness, success at Derby hardened the partnership’s intransigent attitudes. There was no other way to approach football or to run a club – just the Clough and Taylor way. You were either with them or you were frozen out.

At Derby, Clough and Taylor showed their ability to buy players: the unknown Roy McFarland, plus John O’Hare, John McGovern, Alan Hinton and Archie Gemmill. Clough and Taylor took on board Storer’s insistence that courage was as important as ability, and the signing of Dave Mackay became as critical to Derby’s development as Clough and Taylor’s own arrival. Mackay was a totem, a venerated figure at Spurs in the 1960s. Clough knew that if Mackay could be persuaded to come to the Baseball Ground (Derby’s home before Pride Park) the entire balance of the team would change. Clough likened it to a veteran composer rewriting a symphony, and creating for it a wholly different sound and rhythm.

Mackay brought credence to Clough and Taylor’s claim to be regarded as serious coaches, unafraid of reputations and able to do more than mould young players. Clough admitted to me that he was, just briefly, intimidated by Mackay’s reputation. He was the granite figure Derby needed to build a team around. He was almost thirty-four, but there were others who would do the graft and hard running on his behalf. What Clough and Taylor wanted most of all was Mackay’s brain, his imposing personality. On the pitch, he was Clough and Taylor’s eyes and lungs – bellowing, ordering, cajoling. He cost them £5,000 – ‘a bit like getting Laurence Olivier down to the village hall to act for thirty bob’ was how Clough put it. In buying him, Clough and Taylor were again doing the unexpected. ‘We were seeing’, said Clough, ‘what no one else could see. Most people thought Mackay’s days at the top were over. We thought his best contribution was still to come. In relative terms, we were right.’

By 1972 Clough and Taylor seemed indestructible. Derby County won the title that year by a solitary point, ahead of Don Revie’s Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester City. The title – and the double – ought to have been Revie’s. Leeds, having beaten Arsenal in the FA Cup final, lost abysmally at Wolves forty-eight hours later in the final match of the season. But even victors are by victories undone, and so it proved with Clough and Taylor.

When Clough spoke about Derby, as he did frequently, he did so with a sense of unfinished business. I could almost see him replaying in his mind the week in which the heart of the club became the prize in a tug of war, with Clough and Taylor at one end of the rope and Sam Longson, the chairman, at the other.

The higher profile Derby afforded Clough led to more TV appearances and ghosted newspaper articles, which were turned out at an industrial rate. Success lent greater weight to his outrageously candid opinions. It also sealed his departure. With the League championship trophy decorating his club’s trophy cabinet, Longson described Clough as his ‘pin-up boy’. Within eighteen months he was sticking pins into him. Longson’s move to curb Clough’s media work was as pointless as asking a hungry fox not to bite the head off a chicken.

Tempers frayed and finally broke, and Clough and Taylor resigned, each man wholly supporting the other. It turned into a costly demonstration of pride that continued to damage them long after Forest had won two European Cups. Had the split from the Baseball Ground been less acrimonious, Taylor might not have spent so much of the late seventies and early eighties day-dreaming about going back there. Clough might not have treated so many of the directors at Forest with such obvious disgust, fearing another Longson in the boardroom just waiting to ‘betray’ him.

I used to watch Clough’s face whenever the subject of Derby came up. Any mention of them, and especially of Longson, made him wince as though he had been punched in the gut. As the years passed, Clough’s anger was only with himself, not just for slamming the door behind him but also for ignoring one of the rules Storer had instilled in him: Do not stroke the ego of a director. He’d done so with Longson and suffered as a consequence.

In walking out of Derby, Clough dropped the worst ‘clanger’ of his career. He knew that he and Taylor ought to have stayed, hammered out a compromise, however unsatisfactory to them in the short term, and then worked to rid themselves of Longson. Instead, Clough tore up a four-year contract, handed back his office and car keys, and ‘chucked away the chance of a lifetime’.

He often indulged in a game of what might have been. Derby, not Liverpool, should have been the dominant force of the mid-seventies at home and abroad. He thought the best was yet to come from players such as McFarland, Gemmill, Kevin Hector, Colin Todd, David Nish and Henry Newton, all of them well short of their peak. The problem, Clough added wryly, was Taylor. Taylor repeatedly said that the team was so good he thought Longson could manage it. The joke backfired – Longson began to believe him.

What was torn down so needlessly at Derby was rebuilt, bigger and better, at Forest. In the afterglow of Madrid in 1980, after Forest had collected their second European Cup – John Roberton’s low drive from outside the box beating Hamburg 1–0 – it seemed as if the decade itself might belong to them. Just ten minutes or so after the final whistle I had somehow managed to get from the press box down to the dressing rooms, past a line of armed guards. Taylor came down the tunnel and stood outside the door, leaning against the wall. Clough was already inside the dressing room, the door ajar and the players inside strangely quiet.

Taylor’s face was inscrutable, and his gaze seemed far away – perhaps he was trying to work out how he had come to be standing there. He stroked his chin, ran his fingers through his hair and began talking about the match and its critical stages, and the importance of retaining the Cup. As a way of closing the conversation, so he could slide into the safety of the dressing room, he said: ‘We haven’t finished yet. There’s more to come. We’ve hardly started. This club is really going places, you wait and see. We haven’t done ourselves justice in the FA Cup yet.’

I can still hear Taylor speaking those words, and the moment makes me think, incongruously, of the final passages of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, of the dream so close that Gatsby could hardly fail to grasp it. Like Gatsby, what Taylor didn’t know was that the dream was already behind him: the pinnacle of his career had been reached at that very hour.

In the late 1980s, when the bitterness between them had calcified into a high, insurmountable wall that neither could scale, Clough insisted that he hadn’t seen or didn’t care what Taylor had said in one of his frequent ghosted columns in a tabloid newspaper. In them, he often urged Clough to retire before he was pushed out by ungrateful directors or, very presciently, warned that ill-health brought on by the stresses of the job would force him to quit prematurely.

I have a memory of Clough reading one of these pieces to me as he sat in his office. When he had finished, he screwed the paper up in his hands, as if he was strangling a chicken. He tossed the paper to one side, letting it fall on the floor. ‘Not fit for the fish and chips we ate in Middlesbrough,’ he said.

He wasn’t mollified when Taylor began to write expansively about Nigel Clough, an unsubtle attempt to heal the feud between them. ‘It doesn’t matter what he says about our Nige,’ said Clough. ‘I’m not picking up that phone. I’m not talking to him. We used to be friends once – but we never will be again. And that’s final.’

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

What a wast

Like a blind man feeling for a line of Braille, Peter Taylor ran his thick fingers along the underside of his desk. Silently, he got down on his knees and twisted his neck so he could see beneath it. He stood up stiffly and examined the phone on the desk, shaking it and staring blankly into the receiver, then placing it against his ear as if listening for something other than the low, persistent burr of the dialling tone. Slowly, he put the phone back on its cradle and, hands on hips, stood statue-still, the only movement a swivelling of the eyes across the length of his shadowy office.

‘Can’t be too careful at the moment,’ he said at last, without looking at me. ‘There’s lots of listening going on, strange things happening. Some of what I’ve said has been repeated to me by people who couldn’t have heard it. I’ve seen quotes from phone conversations I’ve had published in newspapers.’ His voice sounded agitated. He turned and tapped the wall behind him with his knuckles, as though he might find a secret passage there.

It was a late afternoon in January 1982, and the light was beginning to fade quickly. Taylor had rung me at the office and asked me to come and see him without delay because of ‘something I want to discuss with you – and I don’t want to do it on the phone’. He had spoken with an impatient briskness. I put the phone down and tried to think about what I’d written over the previous few days that might have upset him. I went to the untidy heap of back issues that lay in the corner of the sports department and began flicking through them. There wasn’t any piece with my by-line that I couldn’t legitimately defend: nothing I’d written seemed unfair or harsh. I nevertheless expected to be met with a hailstorm of criticism, and I steeled myself for it. Taylor had been particularly touchy of late, as if he had a permanent headache. In some ways, I suppose he had.

It had been a season of personal torment and, as it transpired, Taylor was then less than four months away from admitting that stress, the cumulative pressures of striving to maintain Nottingham Forest’s handsome record, both domestically and in Europe, had shredded his nerves to such an extent that he could no longer function. Everything that season had gone wrong, for him and for Forest.

When he ushered me into his office and began his strange routine, I began to wonder whether I was being teased or set up for an elaborate practical joke. But when I looked into Taylor’s vacant eyes, I realised he was serious. He was genuinely distressed about something.

Forest were on their way to finishing a miserable twelfth in the League and had been abjectly knocked out of the FA Cup by Wrexham, a Third Division side. There was creeping unease at the casual way in which the European Cup winning side of 1979 and 1980 was being slowly but steadily dismantled. And Forest had bought Justin Fashanu from Norwich for £1 million – the worst deal of Clough and Taylor’s managerial career. Trevor Francis was sold to pay for him.

Taylor had once been the Midas of football’s transfer market, and now, unfathomably, whatever he touched turned to lead. Forest were in acute financial difficulties. The club was guilty of overambition in grandly rebuilding the East Stand at the very time it needed to reconstruct and strengthen its team.

Worse, Clough fell ill over Christmas – a suspected heart attack – and found himself in the coronary unit of Derby Royal Infirmary. For just over three weeks, Taylor took on the entire management burden, and began to collapse under it.

During that bleak season, and the one before it, the atmosphere between manager and assistant had turned sulphurous. The relationship became a feud, a perpetual arm-wrestling competition over pride and principles. At the very beginning of the last nine months of the partnership, Taylor developed a curious but helpful habit of phoning me at home after matches. The call would come either as soon as Match of Day’s closing music began on Saturday night or sometime on Sunday morning. If it was Sunday morning, he would ring from a phone box – I could hear the coins jingling in his hands. Sometimes the pips went in mid-flow; he didn’t call back.