Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough. Duncan Hamilton

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER TWO

      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 life was plotted on a graph of struggle versus hardship. Looking back, Clough saw that period in soft focus, and, after his dreadful falling-out with Taylor, in a forgiving light.

      More than a year after the sadness of Taylor’s abrupt death in October 1990, but with the shock of it still evident in his voice, Clough sat in the chairman’s room at the City Ground and reminisced about what life had been like for both of them in a tough town in the North-East. He was drinking a pot of tea and had ordered a round of sandwiches. There were only the two of us in the room, which had low, orange leather seating on opposite walls and a drinks cabinet. The furniture design belonged to the 1960s. Outside, I could hear fans talking to one another in the car park as the autumn skies darkened. When the sandwiches arrived, cellophane-wrapped on a silver tray, there were enough for six people.

      ‘Bloody hell,’ said Clough. ‘We could have fed Middlesbrough in the 1950s on that lot.’ It was if the phrase ‘Middlesbrough in the 1950s’ was enough to transport him back there. Clough removed the cellophane, took a sandwich in each hand and gestured to me to do the same. He perched himself on the edge of his seat, and began to talk. Although I was sitting directly across from him, he didn’t look at me.

      ‘We had nowt back then – except a belief in ourselves,’ he said. ‘No money, no car. A trip to the pictures was the social event of the week. A new coat was a major investment. I could barely scrape together the money for one.’

      He saw men who had slaved for decades at the same factory become bent and worn down by the daily grind of work. He appreciated how fortunate he was to be a footballer and not trapped in a numbing and mundane occupation. He appreciated as well how much football meant to the people who came to watch him – ‘all of ’em wanting to be you’.

      On Saturdays, he said, the same men would go to the match, then head for ‘the boozer’, and afterwards pick up fish and chips on the way home. ‘If they could manage it, there was probably a bit of rolling around on the bed with the wife and then snoring for ten hours,’ he added.

      Middlesbrough in the 1950s was the archetypal working-class town. But as nostalgia gripped him, Clough began to call it ‘our golden time’, the years in which everything and anything seemed possible for him and Taylor.

      ‘When you’re young and daft and big-headed like I was,’ he said, ‘you don’t mind going through a few tough times because you know, deep inside yourself, that you’re going to make it. That’s how I felt – and then I found that Pete thought so too. You didn’t normally find pearls in Middlesbrough. I did, the day when I met Pete for the first time.’

      Clough and I kept eating, but the heap of sandwiches didn’t shrink much. As he poured both of us a beer in long glasses, he described Taylor’s unflinching support after many of Middlesbrough’s first team had signed a petition against the decision to make Clough captain at twenty-three. He remembered Taylor’s strength and resolve on his behalf during the rebellion when there was ‘nowt in it for him – except friendship’. He also remembered going regularly to Taylor’s home, which he used as a refuge cum safe haven. He told me he felt comfortable there. ‘It was one of the few places I could totally relax – away from absolutely everything. I could say what I liked. At home (Clough was still living with his parents) you still minded your p’s and q’s.’

      Clough began to shake his head, as if trying to stir a memory he had long ago forgotten. After a pause, he said that he was thinking whether anything, such as winning the Championship or the European Cup, had ever come close to the exhilaration he had felt at making his way in the world, and the sense of expectation he and Taylor experienced at Middlesbrough. ‘If only we could go back,’ he mused, ‘relive it … see the way things used to be, we’d be more grateful for what we’ve got now. I know one thing: we’d never have fallen out.’

      I believe that Clough was drawn back into the past because the present was getting too uncomfortable for him to contemplate – Forest were now sinking towards relegation. Having spent a decade forcefully pointing out that he could survive and prosper on his own, and arguing that Taylor, a racing buff, wasted too much of his time studying СКАЧАТЬ