I bought every newspaper that I could afford. In the Daily Express, I read that Forest had sold £4,000 worth of season tickets in the first twelve days after Clough’s appointment. I read a piece in which he said ‘Hope is all I can offer,’ and meant it. I read the list of the players who had been sold, scattering Carey’s side across the First Division, and Clough’s response to it: ‘Forest collected £1m in transfer fees for them. But it’s been the £1m failure. There is only one thing in the club’s favour now. It’s got me.’
His first signing wasn’t a player. He sold a ghosted article to a national newspaper and bought a cooker with the money. ‘Well,’ he said, explaining himself, ‘the one the club had was knackered. But, frankly, I nearly picked it for the team ’cos it was better than most of the squad.’
I went to his first home League game, a 2–2 draw against Orient, wrapped in a parka. I didn’t support Forest. My father was obsessive about Newcastle, where I was born and then lived until we moved to Nottingham after his pit closed in the early 1960s. I was brought up on Milburn and Mitchell, and later, on Moncur and Macdonald. But Clough’s story was irresistible to me. I went to see the man rather than the team. I was just 16 years old, and squeezed myself in behind the goal at the old Bridgford End. In the crush of bodies, I could barely see over the top of the white perimeter wall. I heard the crowd’s reaction to Clough well before I spotted him, a pencil dot in the distance, as he waved like royalty to them.
Clough came to Forest alone. Taylor, who was born less than mile from the City Ground, was still in Brighton, uninterested in contributing towards the rehabilitation both of Forest and his former partner.
‘I knew it would be bad at Forest. I just didn’t know how awful,’ Clough admitted to me well after the Championship and two European Cups had been won. ‘Our training ground was about as attractive as Siberia in midwinter without your coat on, our training kit looked like something you got from the Oxfam shop. We barely had a player in the first team who I thought could play – or, at least, take us on a stage. I even had to teach one of them how to take a throw-in. I also had to teach them to dress smartly, take their hands out of their pockets and stop slouching. Early on, I thought I’d dropped a right bollock. To cap it all, I got pneumonia and spent a week or so in bed. I’m telling you, we could have been relegated in my first season. We were that close to it.’ He picked up a white sheet of paper and ran his finger along its edge. ‘We’d have almost deserved it too. We were useless.’
What saved Forest was Clough’s belief in himself, and the knowledge that failure again – while it would be personally and critically damaging – was never going to lead to the poorhouse. The money from Leeds enabled him to look at things with a surgeon’s exacting eye.
‘I was – though probably only Jimmy Gordon (Forest’s trainer, lured out of retirement) noticed it on a daily basis – more relaxed. I was a wee bit more subdued for a while – just a while, mind you – in what I said publicly.’
Clough said that when he got home at night after a ‘rotten’ day, he just had to look at his bank book to realise that he was fireproof. For the first time in management, he told me he actually showed a bit of patience. ‘I knew, if we just rolled up our sleeves and bought the right players, we’d be fine eventually.’
My first interview with Clough didn’t yield much. In fact, it was awful. Those questions I had so painstakingly typed out were just too predictable and naive.
As I spoke, he went to retrieve the squash ball and began bouncing it on the racquet again. When he got bored, he put the racquet down and began shuffling the papers on his desk. I wondered why he had agreed to do an interview with a teenager he had never met and for a newspaper he’d apparently never read.
I dutifully took down notes in my improvised shorthand and wrote up the piece back at the kitchen table among the scents and steam of a Sunday lunch. I retyped it a dozen times.
Clough declared he wanted to play entertainingly, called Peter Taylor ‘the best spotter of talent’ he had ever seen, and lamented Forest’s meagre gates because, he argued, ‘the people of Nottingham wanted [success] handed to them on a plate.’
As I left, he said: ‘Come back and see me soon, son. Have a Scotch next time. You’ll enjoy it.’
The shop window … and the goods at the back
Brian Clough and Peter Taylor were locked into a marriage and behaved like an eccentric married couple. That is a glib but accurate analogy for a relationship which, by the time of its slow collapse, had grown complex, bitter roots. From the moment the two of them met as players at Middlesbrough in the mid-1950s until their eventual divorce, their relationship would experience the ups and downs of any real marriage.
At first there was the cupid’s arrow of courtship: Taylor, older by almost seven years, let it be known around Middlesbrough’s training ground that Clough was in his eyes the best player at the club. He described him, in a voice loud enough for Clough to hear, as underrated and unappreciated.
Clough was the fourth-choice (sometimes fifth) centre forward in 1955. He was a young man with a crew cut and a sharp tongue, ostensibly self-assured, who rubbed up Middlesbrough’s management and dressing room the wrong way with his brazen and conceited approach. In Taylor, Clough found what he had been lacking: an ally, a kindred spirit and a teacher-cum-father-figure. Taylor found what he had been lacking too: Clough was a disciple to preach to, a one-man congregation prepared to listen to Taylor’s sermons on football.
Second came the ‘dating’, as Taylor broadened Clough’s footballing, social and even political education. Politics and social welfare were important subjects for Taylor. He was particularly conscious of the pay and conditions of the average working man, the distribution of wealth and a rigid class system that, amid the conformity of the 1950s, looked unbreakable to him unless a party of the left (not necessarily Labour) became capable of winning elections consistently. Taylor laid down his political credo to Clough. ‘He was slightly to the left of Labour in those days,’ said Clough. ‘Even Clem Attlee hadn’t been radical enough for him. He wanted the ship-builders to earn as much as the ship-owners. He thought the miners were treated like skivvies. He felt the steel-workers got a rough deal. He wanted the Tories out. The only thing we ever talked about, aside from football, was politics ‘cos we agreed on it.’ One Sunday afternoon Taylor took Clough to listen to the then Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson speak at a working man’s club in Middlesbrough. ‘You could hear the passion for change in what he said,’ Clough remembered. ‘We went back to Taylor’s house burning with it ourselves.’
Taylor and Clough – for at this stage Taylor was, very briefly, the senior partner – were united by four things: a working-class background, a passion for the game and an unshakeable conviction about the style in which it ought to be played, a dislike of authority and obsequious behaviour (except towards them) and, most significantly, the shared belief that Clough was supremely talented.
Taylor saw in Clough much more than the predatory instincts required of a goalscorer. He instantly registered, in that computer-like brain of his, Clough’s good positioning, his skill both on and off the ball, and his ability to strike it exceptionally hard with a minimum of backlift. Scoring unexpectedly with shots from the edge of the box and beyond came to him so easily. ‘He could launch rockets,’ Taylor told me.
Clough went through his footballing adolescence at Middlesbrough, where