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.
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