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

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СКАЧАТЬ mind too nimble for the ponderous Revie, who had neither the speed nor the wit to defend himself. He merely sounded ridiculous, and so protective of Leeds that you wondered why he had ever left them.

      REVIE: Why did you come from Brighton to Leeds to take over when you criticised us so much and said we should be in the Second Division, and that we should do this and we should do that. Why did you take the job?

      CLOUGH: Because I thought it was the best job in the country … I wanted to do something you hadn’t done … I want [ed] to win the League but I want [ed] to win it better than you.

      REVIE: There is no way to win it better … We only lost four matches.

      CLOUGH: Well, I could only lose three.

      At that moment a question mark appeared across the folds of Revie’s face. He struggled to absorb the basic logic of what Clough had just said. A whole minute seemed to pass before the ordinary common sense of it dropped into Revie’s brain. He groped blindly for a half-adequate reply. The best he could offer was a tame smile and then: ‘No, no, no.’

      The surge of relief Clough experienced when he banked Leeds’ money, and had recovered from what he regarded as the ‘trauma’ of his brutal treatment there, carried him through his first, bleakly depressing months at Forest. It was the seminal moment of his managerial career, which I always split into two: before the cheque from Leeds and after it.

      I believe Leeds’ cash was more critical to his development than what happened to him on a frosty Boxing Day 1962 at Roker Park, when his playing career was abruptly ended in the last stride of a chase for a fifty-fifty ball. Clough slipped on the rock-hard pitch and slid into the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. Bone collided with bone. Clough broke his leg and snapped his cruciate ligaments. With twenty-four goals for Sunderland, he was then the leading scorer in all four Divisions.

      In psychological terms, his forced retirement as a player – he was approaching twenty-seven when the injury occurred – is often cited simplistically as Clough’s turning point. It’s as if a player died and a manager was born in that moment, a career reignited by the rocket fuel of rage and injustice, a belief that he had something else to prove and needed to do it urgently. Irrespective of his injury, I’m sure Clough would have become a manager, and cast himself in the same opinionated, single-minded mould. That black Christmas merely sped up the process. But what management could never do was alleviate the crushing disappointment of unfulfilled potential.

      One sunlit morning on a pre-season tour of Holland, I was standing with Clough as he watched a Forest training session. The players had finished their preliminary jogging exercises and had begun shooting at goal, the net billowing like a sail.

      He began to reflect wistfully. ‘I’d give anything for one more season as a player, you know. If I could turn the clock back, that’s what I’d do. You never, ever lose the thrill of watching your own shot go past the goalkeeper, of putting on your boots and tying the laces, of feeling the studs press into the turf or hearing the sound of the ball as you hit it and watch it fly, like a golf shot. I try to tell ’em – every player I get – to enjoy every single minute of their career.’ Cos you never know when it might end, in less than a second. You only have to be unlucky once. Like me.’

      I became convinced that Clough had a phobia about looking at players in plaster casts and on crutches. I could see him physically recoil from them, as if remembering his own experience. I asked him about it when we were drinking in a hotel one Friday evening. I’d drunk too much so I didn’t care. ‘I spent enough time on crutches to know that I never want to see a pair of them again,’ he replied, and ended the conversation as if he was shutting the lid of a box. I didn’t broach the issue again.

      With Leeds’ cash, Clough became one of the first – and certainly the youngest – of any generation of managers to achieve, at a stroke, financial independence. He described it to me (though not on that first afternoon) as ‘fuck you’ money. ‘For the first time in my life, if I didn’t like anything that was going on I could turn around and say “Fuck you, I’m off”.’

      Clough played in the days of club houses. These were residential properites owned by the clubs and rented to a player for a paltry amount. The house was handed back when the player moved on, retired, or, often calamitously, was released at the end of a season into an uncertain future. He played in the days of the maximum wage, not broken until 1961, when most players needed a trade as well, perhaps plastering or plumbing, and could hardly afford to run a car let alone buy one (Clough’s first weekly wage packet was £2.50; when he signed full-time he got £7.00). He played in the days when most of those who moved into management were almost as impecunious as their players, and lived as modestly as other working-class people.

      I quickly discovered that he was obsessed with money, as if he feared he might wake up one morning and find himself a pauper again. He was always, I felt, trying to protect himself against the possibility of it happening. That’s why he took on so much media and advertising work. He would read out to me the salaries of other people – players, managers, pop and film stars, politicians – if he came across them in a newspaper. And he was constantly pushing for increases to his basic pay. I’m also certain that his fear of future poverty explains why he became embroiled in backhanders, or ‘bungs’. It wasn’t purely greed, but a form of self-protection against the dreadful insecurity he felt. Money was his armour-plating against life’s hardships.

      I am sure it all stemmed from the ‘make do and mend’ of his upbringing. He came from a big family, with a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of clothes to wash. He was poor, working-class. You got an orange and a shiny new penny in your stocking at Christmas, and were grateful for it. ‘When you’re brought up like that, always fretting about paying the bills, it colours how you feel about life, the way you regard money, and how you view the importance of it as security,’ he said. ‘I found that the only people who aren’t obsessed with money are those who have got more than enough of it.’

      But once he had ‘enough’, he gave a lot away, and did so without ever being showy about it. Sometimes he carried a fat wad of notes in the pocket of his tracksuit trousers. One lunchtime I was walking back with him from the Italian restaurant on Trent Bridge. In the City Ground’s car park we came across a father and son walking away from the ticket office. The son was about eleven years old. The knees of his black trousers were shiny, the shirt cuffs threadbare, and the toes of his shoes were scuffed from kicking a ball around the streets. His father, a tall, balding man in a worn grey suit, politely approached Clough for an autograph. His son, he explained, was desperate to watch a match. He’d saved his own pocket money from a newspaper round and odd jobs so he could buy the ticket himself. Clough shook him by the hand and then reached into his pocket. He drew out two £20 notes. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘stick these in your piggy bank.’ The boy could barely speak with gratitude. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ said Clough, and strolled off.

      Even though, with Taylor, Clough had won the title at Derby in 1972, and made money from a considerable amount of TV work – also turning down an offer of £18,000 a year to work full-time for London Weekend Television in the early 1970s – he was never financially secure until Leeds’ six-figure gift. After that, he said, he was the ‘richest bloke in the dole queue.’ He felt as if he had won the football pools without filling in the coupon. ‘It was champagne instead of Tizer.’

      All this came at a personal cost. At Leeds his ego took a battering. There were mornings when he woke up and thought, ‘Will I ever win another title, or get the chance to win one?’ and nights when he couldn’t sleep because he was turning over in his mind what had happened to him, what had gone wrong in a footballing sense and whether he could have changed anything.

      So what Forest got in January 1975 was a chastened but maturely reflective СКАЧАТЬ