That season, 1976/77, Chelsea’s future was clouded by precarious finances. The Greater London Council was urged to put together a rescue package for them. Sir Harold Thompson was elected as the new chairman of the Football Association, a decision that would have implications for Clough less than eighteen months later. Tommy Docherty called for hooligans to be birched. Don Revie, the England manager, appealed for more sponsorship in football. Laurie Cunningham became the first black player to be chosen for an England squad – in his case, the Under-21s. Arsenal paid £333,000 to bring Malcolm Macdonald to London from Newcastle.
By the end of that season, Liverpool had completed an exhausting but ultimately failed attempt to win a treble. The League and the European Cup were captured, but in between Liverpool lost the FA Cup final (when that competition was taken more seriously) to the club that was to achieve all three trophies in one season twenty-two years later, Manchester United.
Matches were played in ageing, dilapidated stadiums, and clubs thought silver service hospitality meant providing a clean gents toilet. The terraces were rough and uncovered. Other facilities – if you could find any – were appallingly primitive. The football itself was, by today’s standards, slower and intensely more physical: tackling back then was a legitimate form of grievous bodily harm. It was a miracle that the number of serious injuries wasn’t greater than it was.
But the games themselves were just as compelling, and the players remained part of, rather than apart from, the localised community of supporters who watched them. I’d see players supping pints in the same pubs and clubs as fans on Thursday and Saturday nights. Thursday was particularly popular for a beery midweek session because there was only a light day of training on Friday. Some players, especially in the lower divisions, travelled to home games on the bus.
Long before pasta became a culinary staple of the professional’s diet, footballers stuffed themselves on chips and well done steak for a pre-match meal and then gathered around the TV to watch On The Ball or Football Focus at lunchtime. Managers sat in dugouts wrapped in sheepskin coats and took training sessions wearing tightly fitting Umbro tracksuits. A few still smoked pipes.
Players didn’t look like advertising billboards. They wore shirts with nothing but a number and the club badge stitched to them: no sponsor’s name emblazoned on the front, no name decorating the back, no logo on the sleeve. Footballers’ wives were likely to be found in part-time jobs to bolster the household income. You might occasionally see a wife photographed, not in a glossy magazine or on the fashion or ‘celebrity’ pages of the Sunday tabloids, but in a football weekly. These dreadfully cheesy ‘at home’ shots usually captured the husband in the kitchen pretending to wash up or cook while his wife stood decoratively behind him. The player looked distinctly out of place, as if he’d needed a map and a compass to find his way to the kitchen.
Like workers on the factory floor, or down the pit, the players deferred to managers. In the best cap-doffing tradition, the manager was always the ‘boss’ or the ‘gaffer’, as if he was running a building site. I addressed Clough as ‘Mr’, as if he was the headmaster of my comprehensive school.
Inside Clough’s office, he sat me down in front of his vast desk, which was covered with mountains of paper. I laid my briefcase carefully on the floor. His glass-fronted bookcase held old copies of the Rothmans Football Yearbook, a black-spined history of mining and a picture atlas of the North-East. There was an empty kitbag in the corner of the room, a heap of training shoes and three squash rackets. An orange football lay behind the door next to a coat stand, on which Clough had hung a dark blazer. The only natural light came from a narrow window that ran the full length of the wall behind him and overlooked the back of the Main Stand.
‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he said, disappearing along the corridor and reappearing a minute later with two goblets filled with orange juice. Of course, I didn’t suspect then that his own might be spiked with alcohol. He closed the door, and then sat down and picked up one of the squash rackets and a ball that lay beside it. He began bouncing the ball on the strings of the racket.
‘Now then, tell me again. Which paper do you work for, young man …?’
I told him that I was writing for the Nottingham Sport. It was a weekly A4-sized newspaper (now long deceased), cheaply produced and so impecunious that it was unable to pay most of its contributors. I was working voluntarily, I explained. I had ambitions to become a newspaperman. I added that for the previous six months I’d telephoned the scores through to Grandstand and World of Sport on behalf of the local freelance agency and listened as professional writers dictated copy at the final whistle.
‘So you want to be a journalist?’ he asked, still bouncing the ball on the head of the racket, and then not waiting for an answer. ‘I thought about being a journalist once – well, for about thirty seconds. Would have been brilliant at it too. Can’t type, though. Can’t spell either. Can you spell?’
I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I lied.
He plucked the squash ball out of the air. ‘And what does your dad do? Is he a journalist?’
‘He’s a miner,’ I replied.
‘Votes Labour?’ he asked.
‘Always,’ I said.
‘What about your mam?’
‘Works part-time.’
‘Any brothers or sisters?’
‘Just me.’
‘Where were you born?’
‘Newcastle.’
‘Do you like any other sport.’
‘Cricket.’
I wondered where all this was leading. Wasn’t I supposed to be asking the questions? My palms began to sweat. I dragged them across the knees of my trousers, praying he wouldn’t notice.
Clough dropped the squash racket and the ball and leaned forward, as if trying to get a closer look at me. The ball rolled off the edge of the desk and began to bounce towards the door. He pretended not to be bothered.
‘Ooh,’ he said, wagging his finger. ‘Now that’s a very good start with me young man … North-East, working background, cricket. I bet your mam has dinner on the table when you get back home. And I bet she cleans your shoes and makes sure you have an ironed shirt every morning.’
I nodded in agreement, ignorant then of how powerfully influential his own mother had been, how much his upbringing in part mirrored my own.
‘Go on then,’ he said, ‘ask me a question. You’ve got twenty minutes. And we’ve just wasted two of them.’ Clough leant back in the chair, plonked his feet on the corner of the desk and tucked his hands behind his head, as if he was settling down for a siesta.
I looked at him for a moment, half-expecting him to change his mind about speaking to me. He was just a few weeks short of his forty-second birthday, fit and vigorous. His hair was healthily thick and swept back, his face lean and virtually unlined, the eyes challenging and alive. That familiar piercing, nasal voice was an octave or two higher than it finally became; the result, of course, of being soaked in alcohol.
I put down my orange juice, fiddled inside my briefcase and brought out the thick new notebook. Staring at it, he said: ‘I’m not filling all that for you!’
What struck me most back then was Clough’s supreme confidence, as if he could actually see what lay ahead of him: the League championship and the European Cups and vindication. He had been through three and a half years of violent turbulence – a stupidly impetuous resignation at Derby, an ill-judged decision to manage Third Division Brighton, the forty-four days he spent nursing Don Revie’s dubious inheritance