I became convinced that Clough had a phobia about looking at players in plaster casts and on crutches. I could see him physically recoil from them, as if remembering his own experience. I asked him about it when we were drinking in a hotel one Friday evening. I’d drunk too much so I didn’t care. ‘I spent enough time on crutches to know that I never want to see a pair of them again,’ he replied, and ended the conversation as if he was shutting the lid of a box. I didn’t broach the issue again.
With Leeds’ cash, Clough became one of the first – and certainly the youngest – of any generation of managers to achieve, at a stroke, financial independence. He described it to me (though not on that first afternoon) as ‘fuck you’ money. ‘For the first time in my life, if I didn’t like anything that was going on I could turn around and say “Fuck you, I’m off”.’
Clough played in the days of club houses. These were residential properites owned by the clubs and rented to a player for a paltry amount. The house was handed back when the player moved on, retired, or, often calamitously, was released at the end of a season into an uncertain future. He played in the days of the maximum wage, not broken until 1961, when most players needed a trade as well, perhaps plastering or plumbing, and could hardly afford to run a car let alone buy one (Clough’s first weekly wage packet was £2.50; when he signed full-time he got £7.00). He played in the days when most of those who moved into management were almost as impecunious as their players, and lived as modestly as other working-class people.
I quickly discovered that he was obsessed with money, as if he feared he might wake up one morning and find himself a pauper again. He was always, I felt, trying to protect himself against the possibility of it happening. That’s why he took on so much media and advertising work. He would read out to me the salaries of other people – players, managers, pop and film stars, politicians – if he came across them in a newspaper. And he was constantly pushing for increases to his basic pay. I’m also certain that his fear of future poverty explains why he became embroiled in backhanders, or ‘bungs’. It wasn’t purely greed, but a form of self-protection against the dreadful insecurity he felt. Money was his armour-plating against life’s hardships.
I am sure it all stemmed from the ‘make do and mend’ of his upbringing. He came from a big family, with a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of clothes to wash. He was poor, working-class. You got an orange and a shiny new penny in your stocking at Christmas, and were grateful for it. ‘When you’re brought up like that, always fretting about paying the bills, it colours how you feel about life, the way you regard money, and how you view the importance of it as security,’ he said. ‘I found that the only people who aren’t obsessed with money are those who have got more than enough of it.’
But once he had ‘enough’, he gave a lot away, and did so without ever being showy about it. Sometimes he carried a fat wad of notes in the pocket of his tracksuit trousers. One lunchtime I was walking back with him from the Italian restaurant on Trent Bridge. In the City Ground’s car park we came across a father and son walking away from the ticket office. The son was about eleven years old. The knees of his black trousers were shiny, the shirt cuffs threadbare, and the toes of his shoes were scuffed from kicking a ball around the streets. His father, a tall, balding man in a worn grey suit, politely approached Clough for an autograph. His son, he explained, was desperate to watch a match. He’d saved his own pocket money from a newspaper round and odd jobs so he could buy the ticket himself. Clough shook him by the hand and then reached into his pocket. He drew out two £20 notes. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘stick these in your piggy bank.’ The boy could barely speak with gratitude. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ said Clough, and strolled off.
Even though, with Taylor, Clough had won the title at Derby in 1972, and made money from a considerable amount of TV work – also turning down an offer of £18,000 a year to work full-time for London Weekend Television in the early 1970s – he was never financially secure until Leeds’ six-figure gift. After that, he said, he was the ‘richest bloke in the dole queue.’ He felt as if he had won the football pools without filling in the coupon. ‘It was champagne instead of Tizer.’
All this came at a personal cost. At Leeds his ego took a battering. There were mornings when he woke up and thought, ‘Will I ever win another title, or get the chance to win one?’ and nights when he couldn’t sleep because he was turning over in his mind what had happened to him, what had gone wrong in a footballing sense and whether he could have changed anything.
So what Forest got in January 1975 was a chastened but maturely reflective Clough; less strident, and in not so much of a hurry.
Having thought about recruiting Clough after his resignation from Derby, Forest’s pusillanimous dithering two years earlier worked in his favour. ‘Everyone thought Taylor and I would go to Forest then – ‘cos it was on our doorstep, ‘cos the club was in the shit and ‘cos we were out of work. But they were too scared of us to do anything. Good thing too. I might have said yes, and then I’d never have had a cheque the size of a stately home from Leeds,’ he said, laughing loudly when I sat with him to write a piece about his tenth anniversary at Forest.
Apart from the geographical advantages the job offered, Nottingham being roughly twenty miles from Clough’s home in Derby, Forest were unappealing: a rusting tugboat of a club with leaks everywhere – thirteenth in the Second Division, with plenty of seats that hadn’t regularly seen a backside for years. The average gate was around 12,000, and Forest were sinking slowly under the unimaginative Allan Brown, who left sourly: ‘The board want Clough – good luck to them,’ were his parting words.
Brown was wrong. Not every member of the board hung out the bunting. The chairman, Jim Willmer, was unconvinced, chiefly because he was so worried about the new manager’s temper. With deliberate care, like someone wary that his own words might come back to bite him, Willmer called Clough ‘an energetic young man with an exciting background’. There is a photograph of Willmer shaking Clough’s hand on his arrival. A lopsided smile is fixed rigidly on the chairman’s face, as if drawn by an apprentice make-up artist.
Forest, like Clough, were terribly out of fashion. The club had won the FA Cup in 1959 under the avuncular Billy Walker, manager for twenty-one years. Jimmy Carey’s ‘fizz it about’ side – Ian Storey-Moore, Henry Newton, Terry Hennessey – narrowly lost out on the Championship in 1967 and were beaten in the FA Cup semi-final that same year. What followed was a downhill slither: relegation, disillusion, despair, and five managers in just over seven years – striking for a club which, priding itself on stability, had only employed three managers between 1939 and 1968. Apathy set in, and with it a tacit acceptance that each season was to be endured, and that Forest would again never compete successfully with Derby.
Clough at last brought light to the City Ground’s dark corners; a feeling that something good was on the way. I saved a cartoon that appeared in the Daily Express on the day of his appointment. It showed Clough walking on water. He is jauntily crossing the river beside the City Ground, his feet throwing up fingers of spray. The caption reads: ‘It’s ideal from where I live, it’s just down the River Trent and I’m at the Forest ground.’
He arrived, more prosaically, in another of Leeds’ generous parting gifts: a Mercedes. ‘I’ve left the human race and rejoined the rat race,’ he said provocatively, a smart line which also implied that signing his contract at Forest was an act of self-sacrifice rather than an escape from the stark isolation of unemployment. There was, very briefly, a mutual dependence between club and manager. For all his bullishness, Clough had to prove himself again and Forest risked falling through three Divisions if he failed.
The City Ground was just like the rest of football’s dilapidated architecture in the mid-1970s: a bank of unwelcoming, uncovered terracing at one end, a low, rattling tin roof for protection at the other. The East Stand had hard, wooden flat boards for seats, and the wind came off the Trent and swept through it like a scythe. Only the Main Stand, rebuilt after a fire in 1968,