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

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СКАЧАТЬ or sisters?’

      ‘Just me.’

      ‘Where were you born?’

      ‘Newcastle.’

      ‘Do you like any other sport.’

      ‘Cricket.’

      I wondered where all this was leading. Wasn’t I supposed to be asking the questions? My palms began to sweat. I dragged them across the knees of my trousers, praying he wouldn’t notice.

      Clough dropped the squash racket and the ball and leaned forward, as if trying to get a closer look at me. The ball rolled off the edge of the desk and began to bounce towards the door. He pretended not to be bothered.

      ‘Ooh,’ he said, wagging his finger. ‘Now that’s a very good start with me young man … North-East, working background, cricket. I bet your mam has dinner on the table when you get back home. And I bet she cleans your shoes and makes sure you have an ironed shirt every morning.’

      I nodded in agreement, ignorant then of how powerfully influential his own mother had been, how much his upbringing in part mirrored my own.

      ‘Go on then,’ he said, ‘ask me a question. You’ve got twenty minutes. And we’ve just wasted two of them.’ Clough leant back in the chair, plonked his feet on the corner of the desk and tucked his hands behind his head, as if he was settling down for a siesta.

      I looked at him for a moment, half-expecting him to change his mind about speaking to me. He was just a few weeks short of his forty-second birthday, fit and vigorous. His hair was healthily thick and swept back, his face lean and virtually unlined, the eyes challenging and alive. That familiar piercing, nasal voice was an octave or two higher than it finally became; the result, of course, of being soaked in alcohol.

      I put down my orange juice, fiddled inside my briefcase and brought out the thick new notebook. Staring at it, he said: ‘I’m not filling all that for you!’

      What struck me most back then was Clough’s supreme confidence, as if he could actually see what lay ahead of him: the League championship and the European Cups and vindication. He had been through three and a half years of violent turbulence – a stupidly impetuous resignation at Derby, an ill-judged decision to manage Third Division Brighton, the forty-four days he spent nursing Don Revie’s dubious inheritance at Leeds and the early traumas at struggling Forest – but he was well over the worst of it when I met him. He was swimming with the current again, and back with Peter Taylor. Forest were fifth in the Second Division. Promotion was seventeen matches away.

      The wilderness period changed him, he told me many times later. Each embarrassed step through it taught him career-altering lessons. After Derby he learnt that resigning on a whim led to remorse and regret. After Brighton he learnt to be more careful about his career choices, for going there had been as grievous a mistake as leaving Derby. But it was at Leeds that his most profound transformation took place. He learnt that he needed Taylor beside him, that his abrasive approach had to be tempered, and, crucially, that personal wealth – and a lot of it – was more important than ever. He made a financially jewelled exit, which he repeatedly claimed to me was worth almost £100,000 (the equivalent today of around £850,000). However much he got, the money was critical to the way he managed his career later on.

      Whenever Leeds came up in conversation – even in the season before he retired from Forest – Clough never tired of talking about both the raw anger he felt towards them, for what he regarded as the spineless collapse of the board at the first sign of player revolt, and the size of the pay-off he had been given.

      Why Clough accepted the offer to manage Leeds isn’t difficult to fathom. Brighton had high ambitions but low resources. The club was going nowhere. Achieving success for them, he said to me on more than one occasion, was ‘like asking Lester Pig-gott to win the Derby on a Skegness donkey’. The nadir was Brighton’s 4–0 defeat to the part-timers of Walton & Hersham in an FA Cup replay. ‘I lost to a team that sounded like a firm of solicitors,’ he moaned.

      Clough had panicked after leaving Derby: ‘I had too much time to think – and not enough brain to think with’ was the line he always used. He missed the glitz of the First Division. When Leeds rang him after Revie’s predictable appointment as England manager, it was like dropping a rope ladder to a man adrift at sea. Of course, Clough snatched at it.

      He abhorred Revie and regarded Leeds, then League champions, as insular and rotten. But there was a perverse attraction in managing the club he had remorselessly criticised for half a dozen years or more. He accused them of being cheats and charlatans, cursed them for their gamesmanship. But now he would teach them how football ought to be played. He would do what Revie could not, and in the process, gain his revenge over the club.

      Why Leeds picked Clough is beyond comprehension. His rapid sacking confirmed their gross error in appointing him in the first place. It was possibly the most ludicrously misguided hiring of a manager ever made by a football club’s board of directors. Revie managed methodically. He compiled dossiers and thought intently about the intricacies of the opposition. Clough managed through gut instinct. He dismissed dossiers as frippery and did not think, let alone talk, about opposition strengths or weaknesses. Revie prepared everything for Leeds, from travel to pre-match meals. Clough prepared almost nothing at all. He liked to ‘wing it’, as he told me.

      For Revie, the matter of his succession was as straightforward as ABC: Anyone But Clough. He suggested either Bobby Robson as an external candidate, or Johnny Giles from within the existing staff. In appointing Clough, the Leeds board voted for seismic upheaval rather than calm continuity. The new manager did everything wrong. The very worst traits of Clough’s personality – the arrogant swagger, the confrontational manner, the insouciant impatience – all came to the surface.

      Clough was still on holiday in Majorca when the team reported back for pre-season training – his first mistake. He found the dressing room wildly suspicious of him and almost uniformly hostile. His meagre placatory efforts, such as a telegram to the captain Billy Bremner, were viewed as patronising. It got worse too: a Charity Shield sending off for Bremner, just four points from six League matches, a rushed decision to try to sell players – Terry Cooper, David Harvey and Trevor Cherry among them – and, at the end, what amounted to a vote of no confidence in him. ‘The players,’ he complained, ‘have more meetings than the union at Ford.’

      The vote was hardly any wonder. At his first team meeting, he told the players to ‘chuck your medals on the table –’ cos you won ’em by cheating.’ When I asked him about it, he was unrepentant: ‘Well, I meant it.’ Clough had to go, and go he did – with his pride punctured but with his wallet bulging.

      Shortly after his sacking, I remember watching Clough being interviewed on TV alongside Revie. The hostility between them was lightning in the air; a decade of stored-up grievances added to the tension within the studio: Clough hated Revie, and Revie was appalled at what Clough had done in his brief tenure at Leeds.

      Clough told me that he began to ‘hate’ Revie when he discovered him colluding with a referee after a match. Clough was convinced that Revie had ‘nobbled’ the referee. He had gone to watch Leeds and visited Revie in his office afterwards. He was standing behind the door, out of sight, when the referee tapped on it. Clough recalled: ‘I heard the ref say to Revie, “Was that all right for you, Mr Revie?” ’ Revie, Clough added, said a nervous ‘marvellous’ in reply and waved him away, like a lord dismissing his butler. He carried on talking to Clough as if nothing had happened. ‘There was something about it that told me the ref had been given something – and given Revie something in return,’ СКАЧАТЬ