IF IT was Alan Sillitoe who put Nottingham on the map with his book Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, it was Brian Clough who brought detail and colour to the lace city’s grid reference. When he was appointed manager of Nottingham Forest, in January 1975, the “Queen of the Midlands” was ripe for change and a vibrant transformation that was in vivid contrast to the glum, back-to-back housing and the production line monotony of factory life at Raleigh, the bicycle manufacturer, as depicted in Sillitoe’s seminal work.
Paul Smith, the fashion designer, had opened up some small premises in Byard Lane while slum clearance programmes and new housing developments were redefining the landscape. Amid such shifting sands, Clough moved in to the City Ground and first established stability at the faltering second division club and then a legend that almost eclipsed that of Robin Hood.
Almost a year before his arrival, I was treated to some familiar Clough punditry after the Nottingham derby with Forest at City Ground. As a lumbering Notts County centre half, I had been asked to mark Duncan McKenzie, the sprightly and gifted Forest forward, at close quarters and, as a 0-0 draw ensued, it was mission accomplished.
“If McKenzie is worth £200,000, how much is that McVay worth?” Clough opined in a national newspaper the next day. Not nearly as much as McKenzie, as it transpired, and Clough, shrewd as ever, bought McKenzie for £250,000 during his brief managerial tenure at Leeds United. A unique package, he had many imitators but none compared in terms of success and motivation of players.
Viv Anderson, Tony Woodcock and Garry Birtles were contemporaries in Nottingham during the 1970s but could not explain how Clough nurtured and galvanised their talent to secure the Championship title in 1977-78, followed by two consecutive European Cups. Here was the man who typed a letter at his secretary’s desk during the first half of a home game informing Kenny Burns that he been fined £50 “for passing the ball across his own penalty area”. The Scotland defender was handed the punishment, in an envelope, as he swigged his half-time cup of tea.
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Clough did not suffer fools gladly, nor was he daunted by reputation. One bitter cold February morning in 1979, I recall turning out gingerly for the Notts County A team at Grove Farm, a venue that offered a dilapidated and draughty house as dressing-rooms and a Force 10 gale blowing across the adjacent River Trent as a playing arena. Our opponents were Nottingham Forest but while we fielded nine schoolboys on trial and two older lags with hangovers, Clough had decided he would select Trevor Francis in his side.
The previous day, Francis had become football’s first £1 million player when he moved from Birmingham City. The pitch was rutted, the weather stormy but Francis was in greater peril from passive curry breath, clumsy tackles and Clough’s verbal wrath than the elements. For 75 minutes, the manager stalked his hapless recruit, up and down the touchline, before taking him off with a pat on the back and a job well done.
That audacious ploy, like his achievements in Nottingham, will never be repeated in the modern era but epitomises the maverick of invention that was Clough.He was also, after his inimitable fashion, a man of principle.
Thus when the Nottingham Evening Post was blacklisted during a bitter union dispute in 1978, the socialist in Clough promptly banned its reporters and subscribed to the Nottingham News, a newspaper published by journalists who had lost their jobs through strike action at the Post. Several years later, in the 1980s, Clough would welcome back the paper with open arms and a weekly column, commissioned of course, but not before he had sent a freshly installed sports editor packing from his office with a well-directed size-nine training shoe up the posterior. It was that same decade that saw Clough and Alan Hill, his assistant, linked with the managerial vacancy of the Wales national squad. For days, Clough maintained an incongruous silence until Hill, who kept the Salutation public house in the South Nottinghamshire village of Keyworth, invited me round for a drink.
As a journalist with the Nottingham Evening Post then, I expected an exclusive. Instead, I got a half of lager while Hill explained that Clough did want to talk. He had been laying low at the pub but had flown the nest an hour before. The next day, his story of how he had turned down the Wales FA appeared in The Sun.
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Clough, obstinate and opinionated, did not make true friends easily and trusted no one except family. In the East Midlands, he is revered in equal measure by fans of both Derby County, with whom he also secured the Championship, in 1971-72, and Nottingham Forest. Given the spiteful rivalry between the clubs, it is a testament to his management prowess.
In Nottingham, Clough’s legacy is a stockpile of memories for a generation that followed an overachieving club in their droves across the British Isles and Europe. If any of his enemies are preparing to seep out of the woodwork with some mischievous bile, they should beware.