Clough believed that everything in life was overcomplicated and that most coaches were guilty of overcomplicating football, as if it were ‘something like nuclear physics and Einstein had written a book about it’. A pained expression crossed his face whenever he heard coaches talk about ‘systems’ or saw chalk lines scratched on the blackboard. He looked at ‘Subutteo men being pushed around a felt pitch’ with disgust. ‘Get the ball,’ he said. ‘Give it to your mate or try to go past someone. Score a goal. Make the people watching you feel as if there’s been some skill, some flair in what you’ve done.’
Near the end of what was to become his penultimate season in 1992, I was walking back from the training ground with him. We talked about football as entertainment. ‘You know why so many people queue up for hours to look at the Mona Lisa?’ he asked, all ready to roll out his own answer. ‘’Cos it’s an attractive piece of work. It moves them. They feel the same way about a beautiful woman, like Marilyn Monroe. They feel the same way about a statue or a building. They even feel the same way about a sunrise. Now if we’re half as good-looking as a football team as Mona, Marilyn or a sunrise, then we might get one or two people prepared to come and see us every Saturday – even if it’s pissing down.’
No team, Clough believed, could claim to be ascetically superior if a streak of ill-discipline or a tendency to wantonly bend the rules ran through it. That, he said, is why he so ‘hated’ Revie’s Leeds.
On a Friday he had a habit of writing out his team sheet to the accompaniment of a Frank Sinatra record. A ‘gramophone player’ (he never referred to a ‘record’ or ‘tape deck’) sat on the low glass-fronted bookcase in his office. A drawing of Sinatra hung on the wall. He would sometimes spend a long time hunting for his reading glasses before beginning the painstaking process of putting down each name in large capital letters.
‘You know,’ he said one day, handing me the team sheet, ‘I’d love all of us to play football the way Frank Sinatra sings … all that richness in the sound, and every word perfect. How gorgeous would that be?’ His face glowed like a fire, and he began to sing along with Sinatra, always a word ahead of him, as if he needed to prove that he knew the lyrics. ‘I’ve got you … under my skin …’ He rose from his chair, still singing, and began to pretend he was dancing with his wife. When the song finished, he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. He fell back into his chair, arms and legs splayed.
The smile looked as if it might stay on his face for ever. ‘Oh, that was good,’ he said. ‘Blow me, if only football could be that much fun …’
Who the fuck are you?
The first words Brian Clough ever said to me were: ‘So who the fuck are you then?’
He asked the question in a perplexed rather than an aggressive way, breaking the cold silence of a late winter afternoon. I was sitting in the corridor outside his office, the grey carpeted floor dull and dirty, the cream-coloured walls in need of paint. A queasy apprehension filled my stomach. Clough lowered his head and peered at me, as if looking over the frames of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
‘I’m here,’ I said slowly, and managing not to stammer, ‘for the interview you promised me. I’ve brought my letter.’
I took the folded letter from my inside pocket and offered it to him as if it was an engraved invitation, my outstretched arm hanging stiffly in the air. Clough was wearing a sun-bright rugby shirt. His eyes narrowed, his brow creasing slightly.
‘Which paper?’ he asked, this time making the question sound like part of an interrogation.
‘Nottingham S-s-s-sport,’ I replied, betraying the stammer. The ‘S’ sound came out in a low hiss, like air from a bicycle tyre.
‘Then you’d better come in,’ he said. He took a pace towards the pearl-glass door that led to his office, and then turned back to face me. ‘If you were a bit older, you could’ve had a Scotch with me.’
I stood up and smoothed down the front of my jacket, trying to look nonchalant.
I was eighteen years old, wearing the only suit that belonged to me – a pale grey check with matching waistcoat and lapels as wide as angel’s wings. That morning I had put on a white Panda collar shirt and a tie, carefully chosen from Burton’s the previous Christmas. I had carefully trimmed my beard, which I’d grown a year earlier to make myself look older. The beard seemed to confuse him – he kept staring at it. Did he think it was stuck to my chin with glue? I must have looked like a short, smartened-up version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.
I was carrying a large black briefcase in which the night before I’d put a new spiral-bound notebook (‘The Reporter’s Notebook’), three ballpoints (in case two failed) and a page of typed questions I intended to ask. I had made the list a week before, sitting at the kitchen table in my parents’ council house, typing on the grey Imperial my mother had bought for me on weekly hire purchase from the Empire Stores catalogue. I kept making mistakes, and soon the floor was littered with screwed-up balls of discarded paper. I wrote in capitals so I didn’t have to press the shift key. The ribbon needed changing so some of the letters were faint. In the next room my father, soon to start the night shift at the coal mine, was listening to the six o’clock news: more gloom for the Callaghan government.
It was February 1977. Of course, football was very different then: unpolished and unpackaged, like the decade itself. There were no all-seater stadiums, no executive boxes serving canapés and chablis, few slick agents with sharp suits and blunt jaws. ‘Hey,’ Cloughie said years later, when we reflected on how even nondescript players now carried an agent around with them like a handbag. ‘The only agent back then was 007 – and he just shagged women, not entire football clubs.’
Watching football on TV was rationed: Match of the Day on Saturday night, Star Soccer or The Big Match Sunday lunchtime. Often a grim goalless draw was padded out to fill an hour. Newspapers were thinner and uniformly black and white. There were no dedicated pull-outs carrying the statistical minutiae, or gossip and quotes and graphics to record what had happened the previous Saturday when, observing strict tradition, almost every game had kicked off at three o’clock rather than being spread across a long weekend for the benefit of television. Most matches outside the First Division were hardly covered at all – except in the inky pages of countless Pink ’Uns, Green ’Uns and Buffs available in provincial towns and cities and in the late Saturday edition of London’s Evening News.
No national newspaper had properly cottoned on to football’s potential to sell copies for them. Sport was just a buffer to stop the advertisements tipping out of the back of the paper. In many papers, match reports were squeezed onto three, perhaps four, typographically unappealing pages – blocks of smudgy words set in hot metal type, indistinct black and white photographs and a headline font as out of fashion today as men’s platform shoes.
The newspaper I eventually joined, the Nottingham Evening Post, was a broadsheet. A red seal, in the shape of the city’s landmark, the Council House dome, sat alongside the masthead to denote the various editions of the paper printed throughout the day. The stop press column was full of the late racing results and, in summer, the cricket scores at lunch and tea.
The average weekly wage for a footballer was around £135. The average wage of the ordinary working man was less