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

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СКАЧАТЬ him unless he spat it out quickly, was now always ‘Pete’. No longer was Taylor a ‘lazy bugger’ who ‘didn’t pull his weight’ and sloped off home early or went to the races rather than scouting for talent or watching the opposition. Instead of talking purely about himself, he began to use phrases such as ‘the two of us’ and ‘what we did together’ and ‘our teamwork’.

      By this time, of course, Clough’s managerial career was beginning to slip away from him, and just as it had when Taylor died, the important role his former partner played now assumed a greater significance. Clough was always bluntly honest with me about what attracted him to Taylor: hardly anyone else believed in him. ‘At first Middlesbrough thought I was crap – too mouthy, too awkward. The club used that as an excuse not to see what I could do on the pitch. I was too much bother for them. When you’re being ignored or dismissed, and then you hear someone singing a song about you somewhere in the far distance, the way Pete did about me, you want to hear it.’

      Clough and Taylor became inseparable, and the talk between them was constantly about football: tactics, teams, players, coaching methods. As a management duo they tolerated various barbed sobriquets: The Kray Twins, The Blood Brothers, The Brothers Grim. But at Middlesbrough, Clough and Taylor were just friends obsessed with football. Taylor told Clough that there were things he had to learn about the game, and about life. ‘Nothing separated us in those early days – it was the closest we ever came as friends,’ said Clough.

      Like a professor escorting a student on a field trip, Taylor led him to matches where the two of them stood behind one of the goals to study tactics and pass judgement on other players, deciding who could play and who couldn’t. When other professionals might be out ‘boozing it or birding it’, as Clough put it, or sitting in card schools to make a ‘few bob’, Clough and Taylor would be ‘sitting in Pete’s front room or in a café, pushing the salt and pepper round the table and talking about tactics.’

      ‘Hey, you’d be staggered at how many footballers aren’t interested in football,’ Clough told me. ‘You’d see them nip off to the snooker hall or to the bookies or just go home and lie on the sofa. That was never, ever our way. We were preparing ourselves for management even then.’

      And that is why the third stage in their relationship, the marriage, took place. Like a lot of other marriages, there were long periods of happy-ever-after bliss and doting, loving respect; later came arguments, jealousy, envy and pernickety point-scoring, which led to separations and cold silences. Finally, there was the acrimonious divorce, an undignified squabble over what – among their trophy-winning legacy – belonged to whom, and the mutual feeling of hurt, damaged egos.

      This was never a marriage of equals, and Taylor knew it. Clough was soon the dominant partner. Far more articulate, far more adept at promoting himself and far more comfortable in his own skin, he was consistently the more popular of the two of them – for journalists demanding quotes, for supporters wanting an idol, for other clubs in search of a coach or manager. In management it was always ‘Clough and Taylor’, never the other way round. Once Clough had begun his prolific goalscoring – he claimed 197 League goals in 213 matches for Middlesbrough, and another 54 in 61 for Sunderland – Taylor was locked into his crucial supportive and advisory role, and his salary never matched his partner’s.

      However much Clough referred to him as ‘my mate’ and ‘my blood brother’, however much he described him in generous terms such as ‘I’m the shop window – he’s the goods at the back’, or ‘Pete’s the brains’, much of it, especially towards the end, was no more than an attempt to placate Taylor. Clough viewed himself as the head of the firm, and he wanted everyone else to recognise it.

      While Clough was regularly the subject of newspaper and magazine profiles, and appeared on TV, Taylor stayed mostly in the background. On one occasion I was sitting with Taylor high in the stand watching a reserves match on a bitterly cold night when the was wind so strong that the roof shook. Taylor was wearing his scarf and flat cap, his raincoat collar pulled up round his neck. His alert eyes darted across the pitch. After every player had touched the ball at least once, Taylor delivered his clinical assessment of each of them: speed, positioning, best foot, weaknesses. It was a fascinating experience being with him and watching just how expertly he read the game.

      Taylor didn’t want to live his life, like Clough’s, in a blaze of neon headlines. It discomforted him. He was all tics and facial expressions: a twist of the mouth, a widening of the eyes, an expansive hand gesture. When he was nervous or ill at ease, or just thoughtful, he would push his tongue into his cheek. He avoided crowds and was constantly nervous about being recognised. He didn’t like going into restaurants or pubs in case he was pestered. Sometimes I had to go inside first to discover how many tables were occupied.

      I know he didn’t particularly enjoy confronting the knot of back-slapping supporters who waited for autographs outside the City Ground after matches. I saw him do anything to avoid it. Whereas Clough was fluent in small talk, Taylor found it difficult to communicate with strangers. I would listen to him struggle to find a casual line to begin a conversation.

      The narcissistic streak in Clough was buttressed by his actorly expertise. He didn’t mind being gawped at or pointed out – in fact, he wanted it that way. Taylor preferred the company of his family and the people he knew. He liked solitary walks with his dog or a quiet day at the races. He did, however, expect credit when and where it was due.

      Sometimes I think I grossly underestimated Taylor’s sensitivities. As a journalist, I knew that one quote from Clough was worth two of Taylor’s. I would often interview Taylor first, as insurance, and then hang around for Clough to garnish the story. Taylor once asked me, ‘Are my words not good enough for you?’ in a tone that suggested he knew the answer. He walked away shaking his head.

      To see Clough and Taylor together, however, especially when both were in their pomp, was to witness two people of one mind. One would begin a sentence, the other finished it; one would espouse a theory, the other affirm it. One would attack or praise someone and the other took up the argument, splicing his thoughts into the narrative so seamlessly that it became impossible to disentangle their words.

      At their most convivial, I imagined them as a polished comedy double act. But I could also picture them as good cop and bad cop, sharing a conspiratorial smile and interrogating their victim in a claustrophobic box of a room with a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

      To look back over the partnership is to appreciate how the foundations of their management philosophy were laid in the bleakness of Middlesbrough and Hartlepool, built up at Derby, and topped out at Nottingham Forest. An unmistakable pattern emerges of the way teams and players were assessed, a stranglehold gained over the board of directors and publicity ingeniously garnered. In style and method, the Clough and Taylor at Hartlepool in 1965 were much the same as the Clough and Taylor who sat pitch-side at Munich’s Olympic Stadium fourteen years later watching Forest win the European Cup.

      Simplicity was the heart of it, because the game itself was simpler then, far less sophisticated tactically. That is why Hartlepool, down in the Fourth Division, were managed exactly like Derby’s or Forest’s Championship winners.

      Clough outlined to me how the two of them approached the job. Team talks were brief and uncomplicated. There were no thick dossiers on the opposition, no blackboards (or ‘black-bores’, as Clough called them), no diagrams to follow, no fretting about what tactics the other side might use. Those who could tackle were told to win the ball and pass it to ‘someone who can play –’ cos that’s yer job’. Everything was explained as if Clough and Taylor were teaching the rudiments of the alphabet. A ‘spine’ ran down the team – the best goalkeeper, centre half and centre forward the partnership could afford. The ball always had to be passed, never indiscriminately hoofed, and done without fuss СКАЧАТЬ