How well I knew that feeling. For seventeen years I covered football for two freelance agencies, one national newspaper and for the Nottingham Evening Post. Apart from one season covering Notts County (which, because of its manager, Jimmy Sirrel, was like dropping into the Fifth Circle of Dante’s Hell), I followed Nottingham Forest.
A word or two about Sirrel. He looked like a garden gnome that had been roughed up a bit. He had bug eyes and his nose was bent and flat, as if someone had struck him in the face with an iron. I found him devoid of charm and uncooperative, to the extent that I could barely get a word out of him. Once, pleading for a story, I fell back on the weakest of all arguments: ‘Well, Jim, the fans will want to know what’s going on.’ Sirrel, a Glaswegian, replied, ‘Aw, fuck the fans.’
My morning phone call to him had previously gone one of two ways.
‘Morning Jim. Lovely day.’
‘If you think so, you write it,’ he’d reply.
Or, ‘Good morning Jim. Lovely day.’
‘Aye, but not if you’re dead, is it, eh?’
I couldn’t explore the ‘What if …’ scenario with Sirrel either. ‘Aye,’ he’d say, ‘if ma granny had a dicky than she would’nae be my granny.’
I can’t imagine that any football reporter has physically strangled to death the manager of the club he covered. But there were a lot of occasions when I would gladly have put my hands around Sirrel’s neck, squeezed hard and taken my chances. I longed to escape across the River Trent. That’s where you found Brian Clough. Although he was frightening and obstreperous, Clough would give you a line – provided, of course, he was prepared to speak to you in the first place. And after that one season covering Notts County, my wish came true.
I can only guess at the number of Nottingham Forest matches I watched. At a rough calculation, it was possibly more than a thousand at all levels: first team and reserves, and occasionally the youth side too, which meant getting lime from the still-damp touchline markings on my best (and usually only) pair of shoes, on a pitch in a park. The youth games, normally played in front of the proverbial dog and a few retired men with nothing better to do, were a miniature exhibition of Clough’s peculiarities. Unpredictable is not the half of it.
Often I watched these games standing beside Clough. When he yelled at full volume it was like being pressed against the speakers at an Iron Maiden concert. I could feel my bones vibrate. Some of the opposition youth-team players were so tremblingly afraid of that volcanic bark, and kept such a distance from him, that you could build a small house on the part of the pitch near where Clough stood. Entire matches were played in midfield. If the worst happened, and the ball went out of play, he had a habit of retrieving it from the bushes and hurling it back with great force, aiming the ball directly at the groin of the unfortunate player sent to take the throw-in. ‘I aim at the bollocks,’ he said to me with a mischievous grin. ‘It keeps ’em on their toes.’
With Clough, you could take nothing for granted. Like a hornet, he stung people indiscriminately. I didn’t mind, though; he wasn’t Jimmy Sirrel. I spent many waking hours of my life with Clough in his office, in cars or coaches, trains or planes – so many, in fact, that if you strung them together they would certainly add up to a year or two. And I count myself as very fortunate. Unlike B. S. Johnson, I saw a lot of memorable matches, the matches that stay with you for the rest of your life.
On an August night in Barcelona, after a downpour so intense that the rain seemed to hang from the sky in a single flat sheet, I saw the stubby-framed Diego Maradona perform juggling and conjuring tricks in a pre-season friendly. Maradona was two months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, and three years away from the football immortality – and notoriety – that the 1986 World Cup would guarantee him.
I can still see him now. He sets off on a slanting fifteen-yard run across the Nou Camp, flicking the ball up with the toe of his boot because it refuses to roll on the water-drenched surface. It’s like a one-man game of keepy-uppy. The white ball glistens under the lights as if it’s been highly polished. Three red-shirted defenders dive in and are casually beaten. The defenders turn in open-mouthed incredulity at what’s happened to them before setting off in fruitless pursuit, as if chasing a pickpocket down a street. But it’s too late. Maradona reaches the box and, finishing his work with a flourish, he lifts the ball with his toe for the last time and volleys it into the net. He raises his left hand in a modest salute. It is the hand that will punch a goal past Peter Shilton, the hand that will eventually hold the World Cup.
On successive Saturdays in September 1986, I saw Forest comprehensively dismantle first Aston Villa and then Chelsea. This pair of results, 6–0 and 6–2, were beautifully described as looking on paper like a routine first-round match for Martina Navratilova.
I saw Forest claw back a two-goal deficit in a European Cup semi-final against Cologne on a ploughed field of a pitch. The City Ground mud clung to the players’ boots like glue, yet John Robertson, Garry Birtles and Tony Woodcock seemed to be running on silk. The match finished 3–3.
A year later, in 1980, I saw Forest retain the European Cup on a May evening in Madrid against Hamburg. The air was heavy, the sky like glass. I remember afterwards briefly holding one of the handles of the silver trophy, reaching out for it the way a wide-eyed infant would stretch to touch a coloured bauble on a Christmas tree.
I was there when Forest played West Ham at home at the end of the 1985–86 season and a Dutchman called Johnny Metgod – one of the players I regarded as a friend – hit the ball so hard that I thought it would burst. Metgod took a free kick to the right of the box, about twenty yards out. The ball appeared to me to travel in a straight, rising line of white light before it filled the net. The crowd, in stunned disbelief, were mute for a moment, but then the noise began, so loud it could have perforated eardrums.
And each Saturday I saw the skills of John Robertson, the grace of Trevor Francis and Martin O’Neill, and I watched Peter Shilton save shots that looked unreachable for mere mortals.
There was a downside. I spent too much of my time on motorways. I ate too much takeaway food and sandwiches in plastic wrapping. I stood hunched in car parks in the blowing rain waiting for a pimply-skinned player to toss me a cliché. I wrote match reports in the early hours of cold, midweek mornings, the fierce glare of the office lights burning my eyes, the nightly vacuuming of the carpet roaring in my ears.
Despite his eccentricities – and there were an awful lot of them – Clough made it all interesting and, for the most part, worthwhile. A football reporter in the provinces is in a position which is privileged yet at times almost impossible. He is privileged because representing the local paper is a golden key that opens most doors. You can build up an unrivalled relationship with the manager and the players because you are in contact with them every day. A spurious intimacy evolves between you. You share so much with the characters you write about that you can pretty much corner the market in quotes.
Of course, that access comes at an exorbitant cost. Closeness to the team, and any emotional attachment to it, horribly distorts the line between candid reporting and scarf-waving support. Too many journalists succumb, seduced by the insider knowledge fed to them, and begin to identify with the glory or misfortune of their team. The football world soon divides into ‘them and us’. It is all too easy to become overprotective or self-censoring, so that criticism is either wrapped in cotton wool or disguised in nebulous, worn euphemisms. Contacts become friends, and human nature takes over. You don’t want to lose your place at the manager’s table.
A reporter even half-decent at his job is guaranteed to gather a notebook’s-worth of information which has been given to him in the strictest confidence. He is privy to so much that for various reasons