If you do upset anyone – and a mild falling-out usually happened at least twice a month in my case – the golden key is snatched out of your hand. You are shut out or banned. A total ban arrived for me, like Christmas, once a year. The most spectacular of them came after I had written a report critical of a Saturday League match. Clough regarded the report as a ‘bag of shit’. After the next game, a Wednesday-night UEFA Cup tie which Forest won without overtaxing themselves, Clough sent a breathless apprentice to the press box to summon me to the dressing room. Inside, Clough came at me like a bullet. Emerging out of the steam that poured from the showers, he pointed to the wall. He had cut out my match report and pinned it there. The headline read: REDS MORALE NOSE DIVES.
Clough’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared. He leaned right over me, his hot breath on my face. ‘I didn’t need a fucking motivational talk tonight. I just had to show them the shit you’d written. Now, I’ve got a message for you. Take your fucking portable typewriter and stick it up your arse. You’re banned. You’re fucking banned for ever from this ground. Fucking for ever.’
The captain, Ian Bowyer, still wrapped in a towel, looked at me pityingly and shook his head. The goalkeeper, Hans van Breukelen – who hadn’t played that night – pressed his index finger silently to his lips to dissuade me from replying. I remember Garry Birtles staring at his bare feet and then sensibly moving away. He gave me the sort of supportive sideways glance that I took to mean, ‘Just tough it out. The storm will pass.’
However, it carried on for half a minute more, which for me was like an hour. Clough’s voice grew louder and I thought he might spontaneously combust. I was standing in the centre of the dressing room, pathetically limp and embarrassed, with my notebook redundant in my hand. I wanted the steam from the showers to descend like a fog and hide me. ‘You come into this club and we treat you like a friend,’ Clough raged. ‘And you fucking insult us. You know fuck all about this game. Fuck all. Don’t stand there, just fuck off!’
I exited – downcast, angry, silent, and feeling as though I had been scalded by a branding iron. As I walked the two and a quarter miles back to the office, I thought about his machine-gun use of the F-word. This was, after all, the man who had once tried to dissuade his own supporters from using bad language by erecting a sign at the City Ground that read ‘Gentleman, no swearing please’.
Two days later, on a Friday lunchtime when I ought to have been collecting team news, I was sitting at my desk trying to think if there was anything already in my notebook that I might turn into a readable story for the following night’s edition. The phone rang.
‘Where are you, shithouse?’ asked Clough. (He used the word ‘shithouse’ as frequently as other people use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. ‘It’s an affectionate term,’ he’d explain – though he didn’t always use it that way.)
‘Er, you banned me. You told me never to come back to the ground,’ I said, and heard in return a sigh of mock exasperation.
‘Fucking hell, fucking hell. Don’t be such a stupid bugger. Get your arse down here. I didn’t mean it. Spur of the moment thing. Gone and forgotten now. Come down and we’ll have a drink. I’ve a got a story for you. Fancy a glass of champagne?’
I paused. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Provided you don’t kiss me.’
‘You’re too fucking ugly for that,’ he said, and slammed the phone down.
He was waiting for me at the door. ‘There’s a Scotch for you,’ he said. ‘Get it down you and I’ll fetch the champagne.’
I stayed well into the late autumn afternoon and left hopelessly drunk on Bell’s Whisky. We never got to the champagne. My notebook was choked with stories.
Of course, no football reporter knows everything. A fair amount of what he writes is largely intelligent guesswork, a decent stab at trying to understand what is happening from the evidence – first hand or empirical – that he has gathered from various sources. Clough, being Clough, took a different view.
‘If you’re going to work with me, and we’re going to build a relationship, I’ll tell you the lot,’ he said at the beginning, which was a blatant untruth. What he meant was that I would be told 90 per cent of what was going on 85 per cent of the time – but that wasn’t a bad return.
And so it began, an extraordinary journey with a contradictory, Chinese box of a man – idiosyncratic, eccentric, wholly unpredictable from one blink of an eye to the next, and unfathomably difficult to burrow to the core of. I saw him at his very best and at his very worst.
On the one hand, Clough was capable of being unforgivably rude, unnecessarily cruel, appallingly bombastic and arrogant, and so downright awkward that I wanted to drop something large and heavy on his big head. On the other hand, he could be extravagantly generous, emollient and warm, ridiculously kind, and loyal to whoever he thought warranted it, and he often went out of his way to be no bother to anybody. Ken Smales, Forest’s secretary, said that Clough could be like a sheep in wolf ’s clothing or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but that ‘mostly he was just himself’, a description which perfectly encapsulated my problem in the minute or two before our daily meetings: which Brian Clough was going to turn up?
Flowers were sent as routinely as other people posted greetings cards. Friends found gambling debts, mortgage arrears and bills paid anonymously. Even strangers, if he got to hear about their plight and regarded it as unjust, might find themselves bailed out of financial difficulty. He did it quietly and on the strict understanding that there would be no publicity involved.
I stammered, sometimes badly. One morning, forcing out a question took me longer than usual. ‘Young man,’ he said impatiently, ‘do you stammer with me, or do you stammer with everyone?’ I told him boldly, and with no hesitation in my voice, that he shouldn’t feel privileged because I stammered to all and sundry. ‘What’s the cure?’ he asked. I said there wasn’t one; once a stammerer, nearly always a stammerer. He pressed on: ‘When do you stammer the most?’ I said that talking on the phone was always difficult because you couldn’t use the natural pauses that punctuate face-to-face conversation to your advantage. ‘I’ll phone you every day for two weeks,’ he said. ‘We’ll crack this.’ He almost kept to his word. My stammer didn’t vanish, but it gradually became less severe.
When he was at his worst, and especially when drinking brought out the darker side of his personality, covering Forest was like being ordered around at gunpoint. All the same, I followed Clough with the growing astonishment that Boswell must have felt walking with Johnson across the Western Isles. What Boswell said about Johnson also fitted Clough to a tee: he had ‘a great ambition to excel’, and a ‘jealous independence of spirit, and impetuosity of temper’. Not much, he did.
Looking back, and putting what I saw into context, Clough’s eighteen years at the City Ground was a period of madness punctuated by wonderful bursts of sanity. I don’t know how I survived it without (a) becoming an alcoholic or (b) being confined to a padded cell at some point.
Since the spit and polish of Sky TV reinvented the game, everyone has a team to support, colours to wear, a result to search for on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. Everyone is suddenly an expert too, from the strategy of 4–4–2 and the sweeper system to set pieces and diagonal runs from ‘the hole.’ It wasn’t always like that. Given today’s obsession with football, and the way it is anchored in social and cultural life, it can be difficult to imagine what the game was like before the convulsions of the 1990s turned it into a designer sport.
In the 1970s, when hooliganism ran across it like a ghastly scar, football wasn’t just out of kilter with fashion. It was regarded as faintly repellent, like a sour smell, by most of those who never passed through the turnstiles. I knew a lot of people who genuinely believed that the scene before a typical Saturday afternoon game resembled Lowry’s melancholic painting Going