Team Talk

The game of football is the poorer today after hearing that Brian Clough, one of the few men in football truly deserving of the term “genius”, lost his battle with stomach cancer last Monday.
 
Though Cloughie had been out of the game as an active participant for the better part of a decade, his was a huge presence that will forever be remembered in the British game, a giant of a man who turned two struggling clubs from two of the smaller footballing towns in England to the pinnacle of the game both at home and abroad, collecting League Championships with both Derby County and Nottingham Forest before trumping even those amazing achievements by steering Forest to the European Cup itself, not once but twice – two more than Arsenal, Chelsea, Newcastle United, Manchester City, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur have managed between them.
 
Perhaps Clough was a man of his times, perhaps he would be unable to work in his own idiosyncratic, enigmatic style in these days when footballers earn more in a week than he earned in his career as a player, when players are bigger than the manager, the club, sometimes seemingly the game itself. Perhaps.
 
But even if that’s true, let nobody ever suggest that Brian Clough was anything other than one of the greatest football men of all time, that he, along with Bill Shankly and Matt Busby, did anything but revolutionise football management, took the game away from the blithering amateurs of the 1940s and 1950s and recast it in his own image. A game run by professionals who suffered fools not at all, who understood football and footballers and, most of all, who understood football supporters.
 
Had injury not intervened and slashed short his career as a player, it might all have been different of course. In his heyday he was a predatory goalscorer, a man who found many and varied ways of putting the ball in the net, not always in the most orthodox fashion, but always successfully. 204 goals in 222 league and cup appearances for his native Middlesbrough marked him out as a striker of the very highest class. He moved on to Sunderland where, at the peak of his game, a horrendous injury cut short his playing career and pushed him towards the manager’s office, his first job coming at the age of 30 at Hartlepool.
 
He took charge at Derby’s dilapidated Baseball Ground in 1967, taking over a side that was routinely looking at relegation from the old Second Division, one that was light years away from challenging for promotion, never mind the league title itself.
 
But within a couple of years, Clough had mobilised the local community, got supporters behind him and the club and was busy dragging it back into the top flight. In partnership with Peter Taylor, he had a seemingly unerring eye for a good player, plucking stars of the future from the lower divisions, spotting youngsters who would go on to become all-time greats and giving old warhorses one last day in the sun.
 
Building around the great but ageing Dave Mackay, the under-rated master of perpetual motion John McGovern and the inspirational Roy McFarland, Clough built a team that was infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, a team that played way beyond its apparent abilities week after week after week, a team which he inspired with his own unique brand of motivational brilliance. One minute he’d been scaring his players to death, the next minute he’d be stopping the coach on the way home from a game so that they could all go in the local pub for a knees up. Nobody ever knew what to expect from Clough, but they all wanted his approval, they all wanted to please him and they all worked themselves into the ground to do it.
 
By 1972, that Derby side was good enough to win the league championship, taking it off the previous year’s double winners, Arsenal, beating Shankly’s resurgent Liverpool to the crown, finishing a point ahead of them, Don Revie’s wonderful Leeds team and the Manchester City of Mercer and Allison, the side famously celebrating the trophy win while on an end of season holiday in Spain where they sat in their hotel waiting to see if their rivals could catch them. They couldn’t and Clough’s place in history was assured.
 
Less certain was his place at Derby as he fought tooth and nail with his chairman. That was inevitable for not only did Clough know his own mind, he knew everybody else’s as well, not an attitude that went down well at the time. Clough wasn’t the kind of man to keep quiet about his own genius and with the league championship safely under lock and key, he didn’t get any quieter. Eventually, he and Derby had to part company, a move which lead to protest marches in Derby and rightly so, for though the side that he bequeathed to Dave Mackay was good enough to win the league again in 1974, the Rams had enjoyed the best days they were ever going to see. Without the magician at the helm, the glory days were soon over and relegation and near closure were all they had to look forward to.
 
Cloughie on the other hand was still in demand, both as pundit and manager. Bizarrely he turned up at Brighton a fortnight after leaving Derby and then nine months later he got the job as manager of Leeds United, but only because their boss, Don Revie, had got the job that Clough thought was his as of right – England manager in succession to Sir Alf Ramsey.
 
If Jesus Christ had had his 40 days in the wilderness, then Cloughie had to go one better – or four better in this case. After a traumatic 44 days at Elland Road when he’d told the likes of Giles, Bremner, Hunter and Clarke that they were a disgrace to football and that the way they’d played over the previous decade had been unforgivable, Clough was shown the door as the players threatened mutiny.
 
Resurrection was around the corner though, for in 1975 he joined Nottingham Forest, Derby’s arch rivals. Finding them at the foot of the Second Division – sound familiar? – he dragged them to promotion in 1977 and then, at the first time of asking, carried them to the pinnacle, winning the League Championship in a canter, seven points clear of Liverpool as again, a team of apparent journeymen such as Kenny Burns – “the ugliest player I ever bought” – Anderson, Needham, Withe, Woodcock and the talismanic McGovern were ruthlessly efficient, adding the League Cup to their haul and going on a run of 42 unbeaten League games, a record only recently beaten by Arsenal.
 
A year later, they’d achieved something yet more incredible, beating Malmo to take the European Cup having disposed of holders Liverpool on the way. Twelve months later, it was the turn of SV Hamburg, Kevin Keegan and all, to bite the dust. Two European Cups, a total exceeded only by Real Madrid, AC Milan, Ajax, Bayern Munich and Liverpool. And all that for the smallest city ever to have won European football’s greatest prize.
 
Anything after that would have to be anti-climactic and the fact that Clough never led England was a source of regret not just for him, but for any England supporter who wanted the national team to do well. Ron Greenwood beat him to the job in 1978, for reasons little to do with the game itself, Clough saying, “I'm sure the England selectors thought if they took me on and gave me the job, I'd want to run the show. They were shrewd, because that's exactly what I would have done.” How we could do with that attitude right now.
 
That Old Big ‘Ead never received a knighthood to go with his OBE was the kind of catastrophic omission that underlined that his anti-establishment prejudices were spot on every time. But it was never an omission that rankled given that he’d have only had to send the thing back anyway. After all, why have spurious recognition from the few you had no time for when you could bask in the love and devotion of the people that matter, the people on the terraces.
 
No longer will we hear the great man barking instructions to his players, telling them they’re “a bloody disgrace” or that he’d settle disagreements by “talking to my players for 20 minutes before we decide that I’m right.”
 
We’ll miss him down here, but by taking him early, I don’t think God’s quite worked out what he’s let himself in for - Cloughie always did reckon that God was just keeping his seat warm for him.
 

FirstTouch is published weekly by David Witchard
©2004, David Witchard/FirstTouch Online

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