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.’
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