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

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СКАЧАТЬ within range of me,’ was Clough’s threat. He didn’t want crude cloggers, he wanted tacklers who won the ball so fiercely that no one would come near them for ninety minutes.

      With Hartlepool, and later at Derby, Clough and Taylor methodically set about the task of rebuilding. Clough’s megaphone approach to publicity went alongside Taylor’s unobtrusive gathering of knowledge – observing the quirks and habits of players, scouting, and promptly recommending who might be bought, who should be sold. For Taylor it was a question of combining common sense with psychology to judge the mood of an individual or a specific situation and predict what would happen next. Players were psyched up or psyched out depending on the circumstances. ‘We goaded some, we built up others – everything was done to an instinctive plan,’ Clough told me. But mostly Clough would do what was least expected of him. If a player thought he was going to be praised, he would get a bollocking. If he thought he was going to get a bollocking, Clough would send his wife chocolates and flowers.

      The partnership was based on need and faith. The keystone was that Taylor could – and regularly did – tell Clough when he was in the wrong, when he was close to overstepping the mark, or when he was in danger of making a horrendous spectacle of himself. Had Taylor been at Leeds to take the temperature of the club, I know Clough wouldn’t have blundered around like a novice, falling into traps of his own making. Had Taylor been around in Forest’s final season, when Clough was ruined by drink, his judgement shot, I’m convinced he would have ushered him into early retirement well before it became inevitable.

      ‘Pete’, said Clough, ‘was the only bloke who could stick an arm around my shoulder and tell me – straightforwardly, mate to mate – that I was wrong, or right, or to shut up and just get on with my job. When I rang him to say I’d got Hartlepool, and did he fancy it, we’d barely spoken for four years. We’d gone our different ways, taken separate paths out of necessity. We were football people, and, like the circus, sometimes you have to travel to scrape a living. But I knew I needed him. I knew we were right together.’

      Clough and Taylor were not the first management team in the Football League. Matt Busby leant on Jimmy Murphy, Don Revie used Syd Owen as a sounding board, and Liverpool’s bootroom staff were the cabinet to Bill Shankly’s Prime Minister. But Clough and Taylor were the first to publicly formalise the arrangement and to make it clear, whatever the respective titles of manager and coach/assistant/trainer, that two men, not one, were running the club.

      Taylor was like a protective skin for Clough. When Hartlepool recruited Clough, his playing career was over, and Sunderland – citing spurious financial difficulties – had already released him as youth coach. ‘I wasn’t at my best,’ he was frank enough to admit. He was ‘down’, and ‘there wasn’t much confidence left in the tank’.

      Clough was afraid of a lot of things back then: ‘mostly’, he told me, ‘of failing, and of being labelled a failure, and of wondering how I would cope with it’. We were talking about a fear we shared. We were at Nottingham’s East Midlands Airport, waiting for a flight to be called, and he caught me taking a drink from a miniature gin bottle.

      ‘I don’t like flying,’ I confessed. ‘I’m petrified of it.’

      ‘I know how you feel, pal,’ he said, pointing at the bottle. ‘Let me have a swig.’ I was well aware of Clough’s anxiety about flying. He was always fidgety and nervous before boarding a plane.

      He sat down beside me. ‘It’s not the most scary thing, though, is it? It’s whether you’ve got enough money to live on to feed your wife and bairns. Now that is scary … and I remember when …’ That’s when Clough’s time between Sunderland and Hartlepool flickered into the conversation. It deflected our thoughts away from the flight we were about to take. Witnessing my agitation over flying seemed to lessen Clough’s own apprehension about the journey. In trying to calm me down, he calmed himself down too, and we both felt better for it. Mind you, the gin helped.

      I think about that now because, in much the same way, Taylor calmed Clough with his presence. Clough was asked in 1983 to name the chief influence on his career. ‘Me,’ he said, without hesitation. It was a flip answer to a searching question. In reality, he borrowed heavily from two men: Alan Brown (not to be confused with Clough’s predecessor at Forest, who spelt his name with a double l) and Harry Storer.

      Storer had been manager at Coventry when Taylor played there as a goalkeeper. Under Taylor’s influence, Clough became Storer-like. There are two vignettes, which I heard recited time and again by Clough, which perfectly demonstrate the manner Storer adopted and why his players learned to expect the unexpected, the one-liner that might demolish them like a slap in the face.

      After one game Storer had hauled a player back on to the pitch and shot him a question:

      ‘Where is it?’

      ‘Where’s what?’ the player asked, bemused.

      ‘The hole you disappeared into for ninety minutes,’ snapped Storer. ‘It has to be here somewhere.’

      Storer once gave a trial to a trainee hairdresser. He pulled him aside afterwards and told him to sell his boots and buy another pair of scissors.

      Clough gleaned from Storer nuggets of wisdom and followed them like commandments from the Old Testament:

       Directors know nothing about football.

       Directors never say thank you (no matter what you do for them).

       Directors are essentially untrustworthy, so don’t make them your friends.

       Buy players who show courage.

      Taylor also took away a rich inheritance from Storer. Like Storer, Taylor’s antennae learnt to pick up tell-tale psychological signs about players. He would notice the way someone walked or carried his bag, or sat on the bench beneath his kit-peg, or offered a throwaway, apparently trivial comment as he came in. Nothing, Clough maintained, was innocent or meaningless to Taylor. The nuance of everything mattered. It was as if, he added, the man had X-ray vision. ‘He was brilliant at it,’ said Clough. ‘It was almost as if he could read minds. He’d nudge me and say, ‘So and so needs picking up – can’t you see the droop of his shoulders?’ Or, ‘That bloke is too cocky by half. He needs yanking down a peg or two.’ Or even, ‘I think it’s time we gave the lad over there a day off.’ He could twig a group of players at fifty paces, who had guts and who didn’t, just by looking at them.

      In Storer and Alan Brown, the manager who bought him for Sunderland, Clough saw managers who circumnavigated directors by running the club themselves as much as possible, and he imitated them. Brown’s influence on Clough was particularly deep. Brown was tough and implacably strict. He created his own set of uncompromising rules governing conduct off and on the pitch, and the squad obeyed or suffered; in just the same way, Clough made his players meekly comply to his own rules. Players had to be smart, polite and obedient. Hair had to be short, preferably like an army crew cut.

      There were times throughout his management career, said Clough, when he ‘wished Alan Brown was beside me … I’d have got a straight answer to any question – and it would have been the right one too. I know a lot of managers who have been kind enough to say I influenced them. Well, Alan Brown influenced me because I respected him so much. And he scared me half to death. You didn’t want to be on the end of one of his bollockings. The first thing he ever said to me was, “You may have heard that I’m a bastard … well, they’re right.” And yes, he could be. But he was a brilliant one.’

      There СКАЧАТЬ