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

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СКАЧАТЬ resignation from Derby, Forest’s pusillanimous dithering two years earlier worked in his favour. ‘Everyone thought Taylor and I would go to Forest then – ‘cos it was on our doorstep, ‘cos the club was in the shit and ‘cos we were out of work. But they were too scared of us to do anything. Good thing too. I might have said yes, and then I’d never have had a cheque the size of a stately home from Leeds,’ he said, laughing loudly when I sat with him to write a piece about his tenth anniversary at Forest.

      Apart from the geographical advantages the job offered, Nottingham being roughly twenty miles from Clough’s home in Derby, Forest were unappealing: a rusting tugboat of a club with leaks everywhere – thirteenth in the Second Division, with plenty of seats that hadn’t regularly seen a backside for years. The average gate was around 12,000, and Forest were sinking slowly under the unimaginative Allan Brown, who left sourly: ‘The board want Clough – good luck to them,’ were his parting words.

      Brown was wrong. Not every member of the board hung out the bunting. The chairman, Jim Willmer, was unconvinced, chiefly because he was so worried about the new manager’s temper. With deliberate care, like someone wary that his own words might come back to bite him, Willmer called Clough ‘an energetic young man with an exciting background’. There is a photograph of Willmer shaking Clough’s hand on his arrival. A lopsided smile is fixed rigidly on the chairman’s face, as if drawn by an apprentice make-up artist.

      Forest, like Clough, were terribly out of fashion. The club had won the FA Cup in 1959 under the avuncular Billy Walker, manager for twenty-one years. Jimmy Carey’s ‘fizz it about’ side – Ian Storey-Moore, Henry Newton, Terry Hennessey – narrowly lost out on the Championship in 1967 and were beaten in the FA Cup semi-final that same year. What followed was a downhill slither: relegation, disillusion, despair, and five managers in just over seven years – striking for a club which, priding itself on stability, had only employed three managers between 1939 and 1968. Apathy set in, and with it a tacit acceptance that each season was to be endured, and that Forest would again never compete successfully with Derby.

      Clough at last brought light to the City Ground’s dark corners; a feeling that something good was on the way. I saved a cartoon that appeared in the Daily Express on the day of his appointment. It showed Clough walking on water. He is jauntily crossing the river beside the City Ground, his feet throwing up fingers of spray. The caption reads: ‘It’s ideal from where I live, it’s just down the River Trent and I’m at the Forest ground.’

      He arrived, more prosaically, in another of Leeds’ generous parting gifts: a Mercedes. ‘I’ve left the human race and rejoined the rat race,’ he said provocatively, a smart line which also implied that signing his contract at Forest was an act of self-sacrifice rather than an escape from the stark isolation of unemployment. There was, very briefly, a mutual dependence between club and manager. For all his bullishness, Clough had to prove himself again and Forest risked falling through three Divisions if he failed.

      The City Ground was just like the rest of football’s dilapidated architecture in the mid-1970s: a bank of unwelcoming, uncovered terracing at one end, a low, rattling tin roof for protection at the other. The East Stand had hard, wooden flat boards for seats, and the wind came off the Trent and swept through it like a scythe. Only the Main Stand, rebuilt after a fire in 1968, gave a slight nod to modernity.

      Nottingham was a coal-mining county, slag heaps and skeletal headgears rising out of the clay earth to the north and south. The nearest coal mine was less than five miles from the City Ground (today it is mostly acres of empty grass), and my father worked in it. The National Coal Board advertisement in the Forest programme proclaimed: ‘Mining means business’. Raleigh still turned out bikes at its factory in Triumph Road, and Nottingham’s filigree lace was still among the finest in the world. The Thatcherite revolution, like Clough’s own, lay in the future. The daily news was dominated by stories about strikes and industrial action.

      I bought every newspaper that I could afford. In the Daily Express, I read that Forest had sold £4,000 worth of season tickets in the first twelve days after Clough’s appointment. I read a piece in which he said ‘Hope is all I can offer,’ and meant it. I read the list of the players who had been sold, scattering Carey’s side across the First Division, and Clough’s response to it: ‘Forest collected £1m in transfer fees for them. But it’s been the £1m failure. There is only one thing in the club’s favour now. It’s got me.’

      His first signing wasn’t a player. He sold a ghosted article to a national newspaper and bought a cooker with the money. ‘Well,’ he said, explaining himself, ‘the one the club had was knackered. But, frankly, I nearly picked it for the team ’cos it was better than most of the squad.’

      I went to his first home League game, a 2–2 draw against Orient, wrapped in a parka. I didn’t support Forest. My father was obsessive about Newcastle, where I was born and then lived until we moved to Nottingham after his pit closed in the early 1960s. I was brought up on Milburn and Mitchell, and later, on Moncur and Macdonald. But Clough’s story was irresistible to me. I went to see the man rather than the team. I was just 16 years old, and squeezed myself in behind the goal at the old Bridgford End. In the crush of bodies, I could barely see over the top of the white perimeter wall. I heard the crowd’s reaction to Clough well before I spotted him, a pencil dot in the distance, as he waved like royalty to them.

      Clough came to Forest alone. Taylor, who was born less than mile from the City Ground, was still in Brighton, uninterested in contributing towards the rehabilitation both of Forest and his former partner.

      ‘I knew it would be bad at Forest. I just didn’t know how awful,’ Clough admitted to me well after the Championship and two European Cups had been won. ‘Our training ground was about as attractive as Siberia in midwinter without your coat on, our training kit looked like something you got from the Oxfam shop. We barely had a player in the first team who I thought could play – or, at least, take us on a stage. I even had to teach one of them how to take a throw-in. I also had to teach them to dress smartly, take their hands out of their pockets and stop slouching. Early on, I thought I’d dropped a right bollock. To cap it all, I got pneumonia and spent a week or so in bed. I’m telling you, we could have been relegated in my first season. We were that close to it.’ He picked up a white sheet of paper and ran his finger along its edge. ‘We’d have almost deserved it too. We were useless.’

      What saved Forest was Clough’s belief in himself, and the knowledge that failure again – while it would be personally and critically damaging – was never going to lead to the poorhouse. The money from Leeds enabled him to look at things with a surgeon’s exacting eye.

      ‘I was – though probably only Jimmy Gordon (Forest’s trainer, lured out of retirement) noticed it on a daily basis – more relaxed. I was a wee bit more subdued for a while – just a while, mind you – in what I said publicly.’

      Clough said that when he got home at night after a ‘rotten’ day, he just had to look at his bank book to realise that he was fireproof. For the first time in management, he told me he actually showed a bit of patience. ‘I knew, if we just rolled up our sleeves and bought the right players, we’d be fine eventually.’

      My first interview with Clough didn’t yield much. In fact, it was awful. Those questions I had so painstakingly typed out were just too predictable and naive.

      As I spoke, he went to retrieve the squash ball and began bouncing it on the racquet again. When he got bored, he put the racquet down and began shuffling the papers on his desk. I wondered why he had agreed to do an interview with a teenager he had never met and for a newspaper he’d apparently never read.

      I dutifully took down notes in my improvised shorthand and wrote up the piece back at the kitchen table among the scents and steam of a Sunday lunch. I СКАЧАТЬ