Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

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СКАЧАТЬ It was the Nottinghamshire pacemen Voce and ‘bloody frighteningly fast’ Harold Larwood who led the England attack on the infamous Bodyline tour of Australia in 1932–33, when the visitors caused uproar by their use of so-called ‘fast-leg theory’. The latter – which involved bowling at the batsman’s leg stump and getting the ball to rise into his ribs – had been devised by the respective captains of Notts and England, Arthur Carr and Douglas Jardine, to neutralise the threat posed by the great Australian player Don Bradman, who at the time boasted a surreal batting average of around 100. The strategy worked so well that it nearly caused a riot in the Third Test at Adelaide, when deliveries by Larwood hit Australian captain Bill Woodfull above the heart and fractured Bert Oldfield’s skull – police had to intervene to stop angry Australian spectators from attacking the England team. We tend to think of Aussies as tough, but Nottingham Man is an altogether steelier proposition. When the Australian cricketing board accused the tourists of using ‘unsportsmanlike’ tactics, the English team threatened to withdraw from the remaining matches.

      In the event the series went ahead, and England claimed the Ashes by a 4–1 margin. The row reignited the following summer, though, when the governing body of English cricket, the Board of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which had dismissed the Aussies as ‘squealers’ the previous winter, had a chance to witness ‘fast-leg theory’ in action at home, this time against the West Indies. Suddenly the powers-that-be decided that Bodyline was indeed a mite unsporting, and so demanded that Larwood make a personal apology to the Australians. If he refused, the MCC said, he would forfeit his England place. The furious Nottingham man, feeling that he was being scapegoated, pointed out that the tactic had actually been the idea of his Oxford-educated captain – the plot having notoriously been hatched in the sumptuous surroundings of the Piccadilly Club in London. Why should he, a working-class pro who had previously been employed down t’pit, shoulder the blame for the supremely well-connected ‘gentleman amateur’ Jardine?

      Larwood refused to back down and as a result never played for England again. Ironically, having been vilified in his own country, he decided to emigrate to Australia. A sad fate, but Midlanders are natural outsiders: like Larwood, they generally accept their lot graciously. The great working-class fast bowler’s refusal to accept the blame for his officer-class captain’s tactics has since come to be seen as a key event in breaking down class distinctions in English cricket. All that stuff about working-class rebellion being a distinctively Northern phenomenon just isn’t true, you know.

      Sport is one of the major reasons why the Midlands lacks much in the way of national profile: the perennial footballing giants Manchester United and Liverpool are two of the biggest reasons why everyone knows where the North is. By contrast, no one outside Nottinghamshire takes the sport played here very seriously. Trent Bridge, the home of the County Cricket team, regularly hosts Tests, but its international matches rarely generate the excitement of the equivalent games played at Lord’s (the home of Southern cricket) or Headingley (the home of cricket in the North).

      Just around the corner from Trent Bridge is Meadow Lane, which hosts the oldest – and one of the least celebrated – of all professional football teams in the country, Notts County. They’re not very good at the game, of course, but that’s not the point – they’ve been not very good at it for longer than anyone else, and that’s what really matters. County scored major back-page headlines a few years ago when former England coach Sven-Göran Eriksson was appointed as their new director of football as a result of the club securing fresh financial backing from a Middle Eastern consortium called Munto Finance. Amidst feverish talk of an ambitious ‘project’ to get the Division 2 stragglers into the Premiership, the super-Swede was treated to a typically eccentric welcome on his arrival at Meadow Lane. ‘I had a wheelbarrow, the wheel fell off,’ a hundred or so supporters serenaded Svennis, much to the bafflement of national sports writers and presumably the Magpies’ new director of football himself. Shortly afterwards Munto pulled out and Eriksson resigned after the club was sold for a pound to former Lincoln chairman Ray Trew. Though obscure in utterance, the County fans’ prophecy proved correct: the wheel did well and truly fall off the barrow.

      Which brings us to County’s local rivals, Nottingham Forest, and another great Midland eccentric: Brian Clough. Strictly speaking, Ol’ Big ’Ead, as Clough was affectionately known, was raised in the North-East but as local sports writer Al Needham has put it: ‘Cloughie … was pure Nottingham. Chelpy as you like, stubborn as anything, gobby enough to have a go at Muhammad Ali on Parkinson, and he chinned Roy Keane. He was Nottingham’s surrogate Dad, and we were his lairy, sometimes bemused but always fiercely loyal kids.’ That loyalty was displayed after Clough’s death in 2004, when thousands of fans turned out in the Market Square to mourn his passing.

      It’s interesting that Clough, one of the most successful football managers of all time, should only ever have triumphed at unfashionable Midland clubs: before their world-beating reign at Forest, he and his long-term managerial partner, Peter Taylor, led the no less unheralded Derby County to the league title in 1972. But when Clough then took over an already successful, bona-fide Northern club, Leeds United, he was an abject failure, and his gobby, stubborn, chelpy (it’s not just the North that has dialect, tha knows) managerial style so displeased the Yorkshire club’s spoiled superstars that he lasted just forty-four days in office. When Clough went south to Brighton there was a similar cultural misunderstanding. Only Midland clubs were equal to Ol’ Big ’Ead’s idiosyncratic and abrasive style of management.

      Forest were a terminally unglamorous outfit when Clough and Taylor took over in 1976. The duo gained the club promotion to the top table in 1977, then won the championship at the first attempt in 1978. The European Cup was secured for the Midlands the following year, and again in 1980. (Every year, when the last club from the metropolis was knocked out of the Champions League, Forest fans held a special ‘Nottingham 2 London 0 Day’ to mark the fact that Clough’s team secured the top European prize twice while no London outfit had ever won it. What a pity Chelsea triumphed in 2012 – although the score remains Nottingham 2 London 1. Actually, make that 9–1, since a homesick Nottingham lacemaker named Herbert Kilpin was responsible for creating Italian footballing giants AC Milan, who have won the biggest European prize seven times.) And then there was the little matter of the League Cup in 1978, 1979, 1989 and 1990 – an astonishing record when you consider that it was achieved without major financial backing. Clough wasn’t generally interested in making star signings (Trevor Francis being the exception that proves the rule): in fact, that’s probably why he was cold-shouldered by the North and South big-money boys. Only in the Midlands was success possible on Clough’s terms.

      It wasn’t only in his ability to pick up key players for peanuts that Clough’s managerial style was unique. There’s also the matter of his celebrated bons mots. ‘At last England have appointed a manager who speaks English better than the players,’ he noted sardonically on the appointment of Sven-Göran Eriksson as national manager. Which Liverpool or Manchester United manager has ever matched Clough for wit? And it wasn’t only Clough’s words that were memorable. After Forest supporters mounted a pitch invasion at the conclusion of a League Cup victory over Queen’s Park Rangers in 1989, an appalled Clough took to the field himself and punched a number of errant Forest fans; he was fined £5,000 for his trouble, and banned from the touchline for the rest of the season. The attacked supporters refused to press charges, however, and when they realised who their aggressor was begged his forgiveness. What a strange incident that was. But life under Clough was full of such curious, heart-gladdening spectacles. He was famous for reprimanding his players – telling star striker Trevor Francis to take his hands out of his pockets as he was presenting him with an award on one occasion – and he had a similar authority when it came to handling crowds. As a boy, I remember watching as a sign was hauled out and placed in front of the Trent End terrace. It read: ‘Gentlemen, No Swearing Please – Brian.’ The famously foul-mouthed Trent Enders got the point – and the joke. Afterwards away supporters were routinely greeted with chants of ‘You’re gonna get your flipping head kicked in’, while on-field officials who made decisions that disappointed the Forest faithful were treated to a chorus of ‘The СКАЧАТЬ