‘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