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

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СКАЧАТЬ first team to act as ball boys for the youth side. It was Brown who yanked Clough, on his first day at Sunderland, off the touchline of the training pitch for talking to a friend and publicly dressed him down for it, like a schoolboy caught with matches in his pocket. It was Brown who made him brew the tea. What Brown did at Sunderland, Clough incorporated into own his management style. For him, Brown was the coaching book, the manager’s ‘how to’ manual, and each page glittered with good sense. In essence, he made things simple.

      At Hartlepool, ‘the cupboard was financially bare’, with ‘not a scrag end in it’. So parlous was the club’s financial state that Brown, who had moved on to manage Sheffield Wednesday, gave Clough his squad’s cast-off training kit. Clough and Taylor had no option but to work on the very fabric of the club: painting and repairing the stands and doing odd jobs themselves. Clough got a licence to drive the team coach: a practical necessity, but also a valuable piece of publicity. He knew that headlines would lead to increased gates, and Clough’s natural bent was excess. There were other gimmicks. He worked for two months without pay (Taylor politely declined to match this act of self-sacrifice). He even loaned the club money from his own testimonial fund on the proviso that the identity of Hartlepool’s ‘mystery benefactor’ remained secret. It created yet another headline for the club.

      The value of a proper, shared partnership became apparent, if only on a practical level. ‘Without Pete, the job would have been impossible,’ said Clough. ‘It would have been too much for one bloke. Blow me, I’d have been a wreck – just through the sheer exhaustion of what we had to do every day, covering leaks in the roof, covering leaks in the team, rattling the begging bowl wherever we went. We didn’t have time to stop for a piss …’

      Their reward for driving themselves so relentlessly came in 1967: a job at Derby. Hartlepool were already on the brink of promotion, which was sufficient to back up Len Shackleton’s generous recommendation of Clough – the equivalent of a papal blessing – to Derby’s sceptical board. Shackleton, an ex-Sunderland and England player, had become a journalist with the Sunday People. He was revered not only as a player but also as an acute observer of the game. If Shackleton said something, you knew it was true. Almost as if he was Clough’s agent, Shackleton had been responsible for tipping off Hartlepool about him too. Clough was persuasive enough to impress Derby and, typically, he arm-twisted them to take on Taylor as well, albeit for much less money. Clough’s status was amply reflected in his salary of £5,000 compared with Taylor’s £2,500.

      Derby made Clough and Taylor. What happened there – the renaissance of a small, inconsequential provincial club who went on to become League champions – was a lavish dress rehearsal for what was to follow at Nottingham Forest. Powered by the force of Clough’s charismatic will and Taylor’s shrewdness, success at Derby hardened the partnership’s intransigent attitudes. There was no other way to approach football or to run a club – just the Clough and Taylor way. You were either with them or you were frozen out.

      At Derby, Clough and Taylor showed their ability to buy players: the unknown Roy McFarland, plus John O’Hare, John McGovern, Alan Hinton and Archie Gemmill. Clough and Taylor took on board Storer’s insistence that courage was as important as ability, and the signing of Dave Mackay became as critical to Derby’s development as Clough and Taylor’s own arrival. Mackay was a totem, a venerated figure at Spurs in the 1960s. Clough knew that if Mackay could be persuaded to come to the Baseball Ground (Derby’s home before Pride Park) the entire balance of the team would change. Clough likened it to a veteran composer rewriting a symphony, and creating for it a wholly different sound and rhythm.

      Mackay brought credence to Clough and Taylor’s claim to be regarded as serious coaches, unafraid of reputations and able to do more than mould young players. Clough admitted to me that he was, just briefly, intimidated by Mackay’s reputation. He was the granite figure Derby needed to build a team around. He was almost thirty-four, but there were others who would do the graft and hard running on his behalf. What Clough and Taylor wanted most of all was Mackay’s brain, his imposing personality. On the pitch, he was Clough and Taylor’s eyes and lungs – bellowing, ordering, cajoling. He cost them £5,000 – ‘a bit like getting Laurence Olivier down to the village hall to act for thirty bob’ was how Clough put it. In buying him, Clough and Taylor were again doing the unexpected. ‘We were seeing’, said Clough, ‘what no one else could see. Most people thought Mackay’s days at the top were over. We thought his best contribution was still to come. In relative terms, we were right.’

      By 1972 Clough and Taylor seemed indestructible. Derby County won the title that year by a solitary point, ahead of Don Revie’s Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester City. The title – and the double – ought to have been Revie’s. Leeds, having beaten Arsenal in the FA Cup final, lost abysmally at Wolves forty-eight hours later in the final match of the season. But even victors are by victories undone, and so it proved with Clough and Taylor.

      When Clough spoke about Derby, as he did frequently, he did so with a sense of unfinished business. I could almost see him replaying in his mind the week in which the heart of the club became the prize in a tug of war, with Clough and Taylor at one end of the rope and Sam Longson, the chairman, at the other.

      The higher profile Derby afforded Clough led to more TV appearances and ghosted newspaper articles, which were turned out at an industrial rate. Success lent greater weight to his outrageously candid opinions. It also sealed his departure. With the League championship trophy decorating his club’s trophy cabinet, Longson described Clough as his ‘pin-up boy’. Within eighteen months he was sticking pins into him. Longson’s move to curb Clough’s media work was as pointless as asking a hungry fox not to bite the head off a chicken.

      Tempers frayed and finally broke, and Clough and Taylor resigned, each man wholly supporting the other. It turned into a costly demonstration of pride that continued to damage them long after Forest had won two European Cups. Had the split from the Baseball Ground been less acrimonious, Taylor might not have spent so much of the late seventies and early eighties day-dreaming about going back there. Clough might not have treated so many of the directors at Forest with such obvious disgust, fearing another Longson in the boardroom just waiting to ‘betray’ him.

      I used to watch Clough’s face whenever the subject of Derby came up. Any mention of them, and especially of Longson, made him wince as though he had been punched in the gut. As the years passed, Clough’s anger was only with himself, not just for slamming the door behind him but also for ignoring one of the rules Storer had instilled in him: Do not stroke the ego of a director. He’d done so with Longson and suffered as a consequence.

      In walking out of Derby, Clough dropped the worst ‘clanger’ of his career. He knew that he and Taylor ought to have stayed, hammered out a compromise, however unsatisfactory to them in the short term, and then worked to rid themselves of Longson. Instead, Clough tore up a four-year contract, handed back his office and car keys, and ‘chucked away the chance of a lifetime’.

      He often indulged in a game of what might have been. Derby, not Liverpool, should have been the dominant force of the mid-seventies at home and abroad. He thought the best was yet to come from players such as McFarland, Gemmill, Kevin Hector, Colin Todd, David Nish and Henry Newton, all of them well short of their peak. The problem, Clough added wryly, was Taylor. Taylor repeatedly said that the team was so good he thought Longson could manage it. The joke backfired – Longson began to believe him.

      What was torn down so needlessly at Derby was rebuilt, bigger and better, at Forest. In the afterglow of Madrid in 1980, after Forest had collected their second European Cup – John Roberton’s low drive from outside the box beating Hamburg 1–0 – it seemed as if the decade itself might belong to them. Just ten minutes or so after the final whistle I had somehow managed to get from the press box down to the dressing rooms, past a line of armed guards. Taylor came down the tunnel and stood outside the door, leaning against the wall. Clough was already СКАЧАТЬ