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