The wilderness period changed him, he told me many times later. Each embarrassed step through it taught him career-altering lessons. After Derby he learnt that resigning on a whim led to remorse and regret. After Brighton he learnt to be more careful about his career choices, for going there had been as grievous a mistake as leaving Derby. But it was at Leeds that his most profound transformation took place. He learnt that he needed Taylor beside him, that his abrasive approach had to be tempered, and, crucially, that personal wealth – and a lot of it – was more important than ever. He made a financially jewelled exit, which he repeatedly claimed to me was worth almost £100,000 (the equivalent today of around £850,000). However much he got, the money was critical to the way he managed his career later on.
Whenever Leeds came up in conversation – even in the season before he retired from Forest – Clough never tired of talking about both the raw anger he felt towards them, for what he regarded as the spineless collapse of the board at the first sign of player revolt, and the size of the pay-off he had been given.
Why Clough accepted the offer to manage Leeds isn’t difficult to fathom. Brighton had high ambitions but low resources. The club was going nowhere. Achieving success for them, he said to me on more than one occasion, was ‘like asking Lester Pig-gott to win the Derby on a Skegness donkey’. The nadir was Brighton’s 4–0 defeat to the part-timers of Walton & Hersham in an FA Cup replay. ‘I lost to a team that sounded like a firm of solicitors,’ he moaned.
Clough had panicked after leaving Derby: ‘I had too much time to think – and not enough brain to think with’ was the line he always used. He missed the glitz of the First Division. When Leeds rang him after Revie’s predictable appointment as England manager, it was like dropping a rope ladder to a man adrift at sea. Of course, Clough snatched at it.
He abhorred Revie and regarded Leeds, then League champions, as insular and rotten. But there was a perverse attraction in managing the club he had remorselessly criticised for half a dozen years or more. He accused them of being cheats and charlatans, cursed them for their gamesmanship. But now he would teach them how football ought to be played. He would do what Revie could not, and in the process, gain his revenge over the club.
Why Leeds picked Clough is beyond comprehension. His rapid sacking confirmed their gross error in appointing him in the first place. It was possibly the most ludicrously misguided hiring of a manager ever made by a football club’s board of directors. Revie managed methodically. He compiled dossiers and thought intently about the intricacies of the opposition. Clough managed through gut instinct. He dismissed dossiers as frippery and did not think, let alone talk, about opposition strengths or weaknesses. Revie prepared everything for Leeds, from travel to pre-match meals. Clough prepared almost nothing at all. He liked to ‘wing it’, as he told me.
For Revie, the matter of his succession was as straightforward as ABC: Anyone But Clough. He suggested either Bobby Robson as an external candidate, or Johnny Giles from within the existing staff. In appointing Clough, the Leeds board voted for seismic upheaval rather than calm continuity. The new manager did everything wrong. The very worst traits of Clough’s personality – the arrogant swagger, the confrontational manner, the insouciant impatience – all came to the surface.
Clough was still on holiday in Majorca when the team reported back for pre-season training – his first mistake. He found the dressing room wildly suspicious of him and almost uniformly hostile. His meagre placatory efforts, such as a telegram to the captain Billy Bremner, were viewed as patronising. It got worse too: a Charity Shield sending off for Bremner, just four points from six League matches, a rushed decision to try to sell players – Terry Cooper, David Harvey and Trevor Cherry among them – and, at the end, what amounted to a vote of no confidence in him. ‘The players,’ he complained, ‘have more meetings than the union at Ford.’
The vote was hardly any wonder. At his first team meeting, he told the players to ‘chuck your medals on the table –’ cos you won ’em by cheating.’ When I asked him about it, he was unrepentant: ‘Well, I meant it.’ Clough had to go, and go he did – with his pride punctured but with his wallet bulging.
Shortly after his sacking, I remember watching Clough being interviewed on TV alongside Revie. The hostility between them was lightning in the air; a decade of stored-up grievances added to the tension within the studio: Clough hated Revie, and Revie was appalled at what Clough had done in his brief tenure at Leeds.
Clough told me that he began to ‘hate’ Revie when he discovered him colluding with a referee after a match. Clough was convinced that Revie had ‘nobbled’ the referee. He had gone to watch Leeds and visited Revie in his office afterwards. He was standing behind the door, out of sight, when the referee tapped on it. Clough recalled: ‘I heard the ref say to Revie, “Was that all right for you, Mr Revie?” ’ Revie, Clough added, said a nervous ‘marvellous’ in reply and waved him away, like a lord dismissing his butler. He carried on talking to Clough as if nothing had happened. ‘There was something about it that told me the ref had been given something – and given Revie something in return,’ said Clough. ‘I knew Revie was bent.’
Clough won the TV contest comfortably on points, his mind too nimble for the ponderous Revie, who had neither the speed nor the wit to defend himself. He merely sounded ridiculous, and so protective of Leeds that you wondered why he had ever left them.
REVIE: Why did you come from Brighton to Leeds to take over when you criticised us so much and said we should be in the Second Division, and that we should do this and we should do that. Why did you take the job?
CLOUGH: Because I thought it was the best job in the country … I wanted to do something you hadn’t done … I want [ed] to win the League but I want [ed] to win it better than you.
REVIE: There is no way to win it better … We only lost four matches.
CLOUGH: Well, I could only lose three.
At that moment a question mark appeared across the folds of Revie’s face. He struggled to absorb the basic logic of what Clough had just said. A whole minute seemed to pass before the ordinary common sense of it dropped into Revie’s brain. He groped blindly for a half-adequate reply. The best he could offer was a tame smile and then: ‘No, no, no.’
The surge of relief Clough experienced when he banked Leeds’ money, and had recovered from what he regarded as the ‘trauma’ of his brutal treatment there, carried him through his first, bleakly depressing months at Forest. It was the seminal moment of his managerial career, which I always split into two: before the cheque from Leeds and after it.
I believe Leeds’ cash was more critical to his development than what happened to him on a frosty Boxing Day 1962 at Roker Park, when his playing career was abruptly ended in the last stride of a chase for a fifty-fifty ball. Clough slipped on the rock-hard pitch and slid into the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. Bone collided with bone. Clough broke his leg and snapped his cruciate ligaments. With twenty-four goals for Sunderland, he was then the leading scorer in all four Divisions.
In psychological terms, his forced retirement as a player – he was approaching twenty-seven when the injury occurred – is often cited simplistically as Clough’s turning point. It’s as if a player died and a manager was born in that moment, a career reignited by the rocket fuel of rage and injustice, a belief that he had something else to prove and needed to do it urgently. Irrespective of his injury, I’m sure Clough would have become a manager, and cast himself in the same opinionated, single-minded mould. That black Christmas merely sped up the process. But what management could never do was alleviate the crushing disappointment of unfulfilled potential.
One sunlit morning on a pre-season tour of Holland, I was standing with Clough as he watched a Forest training session. The players had finished their preliminary jogging exercises and had begun shooting at goal, the net billowing like a sail.
He began to reflect wistfully. ‘I’d give anything for one more season as a player, you know. If I could turn the clock back, that’s what I’d