Читать книгу Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough - Duncan Hamilton, Duncan Hamilton, Jonny Bairstow - Страница 6

The first words Brian Clough ever said to me were: ‘So who the fuck are you then?’

He asked the question in a perplexed rather than an aggressive way, breaking the cold silence of a late winter afternoon. I was sitting in the corridor outside his office, the grey carpeted floor dull and dirty, the cream-coloured walls in need of paint. A queasy apprehension filled my stomach. Clough lowered his head and peered at me, as if looking over the frames of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

‘I’m here,’ I said slowly, and managing not to stammer, ‘for the interview you promised me. I’ve brought my letter.’

I took the folded letter from my inside pocket and offered it to him as if it was an engraved invitation, my outstretched arm hanging stiffly in the air. Clough was wearing a sun-bright rugby shirt. His eyes narrowed, his brow creasing slightly.

‘Which paper?’ he asked, this time making the question sound like part of an interrogation.

‘Nottingham S-s-s-sport,’ I replied, betraying the stammer. The ‘S’ sound came out in a low hiss, like air from a bicycle tyre.

‘Then you’d better come in,’ he said. He took a pace towards the pearl-glass door that led to his office, and then turned back to face me. ‘If you were a bit older, you could’ve had a Scotch with me.’

I stood up and smoothed down the front of my jacket, trying to look nonchalant.

I was eighteen years old, wearing the only suit that belonged to me – a pale grey check with matching waistcoat and lapels as wide as angel’s wings. That morning I had put on a white Panda collar shirt and a tie, carefully chosen from Burton’s the previous Christmas. I had carefully trimmed my beard, which I’d grown a year earlier to make myself look older. The beard seemed to confuse him – he kept staring at it. Did he think it was stuck to my chin with glue? I must have looked like a short, smartened-up version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

I was carrying a large black briefcase in which the night before I’d put a new spiral-bound notebook (‘The Reporter’s Notebook’), three ballpoints (in case two failed) and a page of typed questions I intended to ask. I had made the list a week before, sitting at the kitchen table in my parents’ council house, typing on the grey Imperial my mother had bought for me on weekly hire purchase from the Empire Stores catalogue. I kept making mistakes, and soon the floor was littered with screwed-up balls of discarded paper. I wrote in capitals so I didn’t have to press the shift key. The ribbon needed changing so some of the letters were faint. In the next room my father, soon to start the night shift at the coal mine, was listening to the six o’clock news: more gloom for the Callaghan government.

It was February 1977. Of course, football was very different then: unpolished and unpackaged, like the decade itself. There were no all-seater stadiums, no executive boxes serving canapés and chablis, few slick agents with sharp suits and blunt jaws. ‘Hey,’ Cloughie said years later, when we reflected on how even nondescript players now carried an agent around with them like a handbag. ‘The only agent back then was 007 – and he just shagged women, not entire football clubs.’

Watching football on TV was rationed: Match of the Day on Saturday night, Star Soccer or The Big Match Sunday lunchtime. Often a grim goalless draw was padded out to fill an hour. Newspapers were thinner and uniformly black and white. There were no dedicated pull-outs carrying the statistical minutiae, or gossip and quotes and graphics to record what had happened the previous Saturday when, observing strict tradition, almost every game had kicked off at three o’clock rather than being spread across a long weekend for the benefit of television. Most matches outside the First Division were hardly covered at all – except in the inky pages of countless Pink ’Uns, Green ’Uns and Buffs available in provincial towns and cities and in the late Saturday edition of London’s Evening News.

No national newspaper had properly cottoned on to football’s potential to sell copies for them. Sport was just a buffer to stop the advertisements tipping out of the back of the paper. In many papers, match reports were squeezed onto three, perhaps four, typographically unappealing pages – blocks of smudgy words set in hot metal type, indistinct black and white photographs and a headline font as out of fashion today as men’s platform shoes.

The newspaper I eventually joined, the Nottingham Evening Post, was a broadsheet. A red seal, in the shape of the city’s landmark, the Council House dome, sat alongside the masthead to denote the various editions of the paper printed throughout the day. The stop press column was full of the late racing results and, in summer, the cricket scores at lunch and tea.

The average weekly wage for a footballer was around £135. The average wage of the ordinary working man was less than £70. You could sit at a First Division match for £2.20 or go on the terraces, thick with cigarette smoke, for a pound or less. (If you did stand, there was always a risk, in such a very cramped space, that the man behind you might piss his lunchtime beer down the back of your legs). Forest’s matchday programme, like most others, cost 12p, and the back-page advertisement was usually for a cigarette company. ‘It’s Still the Tobacco that Counts’, claimed John Player.

That season, 1976/77, Chelsea’s future was clouded by precarious finances. The Greater London Council was urged to put together a rescue package for them. Sir Harold Thompson was elected as the new chairman of the Football Association, a decision that would have implications for Clough less than eighteen months later. Tommy Docherty called for hooligans to be birched. Don Revie, the England manager, appealed for more sponsorship in football. Laurie Cunningham became the first black player to be chosen for an England squad – in his case, the Under-21s. Arsenal paid £333,000 to bring Malcolm Macdonald to London from Newcastle.

By the end of that season, Liverpool had completed an exhausting but ultimately failed attempt to win a treble. The League and the European Cup were captured, but in between Liverpool lost the FA Cup final (when that competition was taken more seriously) to the club that was to achieve all three trophies in one season twenty-two years later, Manchester United.

Matches were played in ageing, dilapidated stadiums, and clubs thought silver service hospitality meant providing a clean gents toilet. The terraces were rough and uncovered. Other facilities – if you could find any – were appallingly primitive. The football itself was, by today’s standards, slower and intensely more physical: tackling back then was a legitimate form of grievous bodily harm. It was a miracle that the number of serious injuries wasn’t greater than it was.

But the games themselves were just as compelling, and the players remained part of, rather than apart from, the localised community of supporters who watched them. I’d see players supping pints in the same pubs and clubs as fans on Thursday and Saturday nights. Thursday was particularly popular for a beery midweek session because there was only a light day of training on Friday. Some players, especially in the lower divisions, travelled to home games on the bus.

Long before pasta became a culinary staple of the professional’s diet, footballers stuffed themselves on chips and well done steak for a pre-match meal and then gathered around the TV to watch On The Ball or Football Focus at lunchtime. Managers sat in dugouts wrapped in sheepskin coats and took training sessions wearing tightly fitting Umbro tracksuits. A few still smoked pipes.

Players didn’t look like advertising billboards. They wore shirts with nothing but a number and the club badge stitched to them: no sponsor’s name emblazoned on the front, no name decorating the back, no logo on the sleeve. Footballers’ wives were likely to be found in part-time jobs to bolster the household income. You might occasionally see a wife photographed, not in a glossy magazine or on the fashion or ‘celebrity’ pages of the Sunday tabloids, but in a football weekly. These dreadfully cheesy ‘at home’ shots usually captured the husband in the kitchen pretending to wash up or cook while his wife stood decoratively behind him. The player looked distinctly out of place, as if he’d needed a map and a compass to find his way to the kitchen.

Like workers on the factory floor, or down the pit, the players deferred to managers. In the best cap-doffing tradition, the manager was always the ‘boss’ or the ‘gaffer’, as if he was running a building site. I addressed Clough as ‘Mr’, as if he was the headmaster of my comprehensive school.

Inside Clough’s office, he sat me down in front of his vast desk, which was covered with mountains of paper. I laid my briefcase carefully on the floor. His glass-fronted bookcase held old copies of the Rothmans Football Yearbook, a black-spined history of mining and a picture atlas of the North-East. There was an empty kitbag in the corner of the room, a heap of training shoes and three squash rackets. An orange football lay behind the door next to a coat stand, on which Clough had hung a dark blazer. The only natural light came from a narrow window that ran the full length of the wall behind him and overlooked the back of the Main Stand.

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he said, disappearing along the corridor and reappearing a minute later with two goblets filled with orange juice. Of course, I didn’t suspect then that his own might be spiked with alcohol. He closed the door, and then sat down and picked up one of the squash rackets and a ball that lay beside it. He began bouncing the ball on the strings of the racket.

‘Now then, tell me again. Which paper do you work for, young man …?’

I told him that I was writing for the Nottingham Sport. It was a weekly A4-sized newspaper (now long deceased), cheaply produced and so impecunious that it was unable to pay most of its contributors. I was working voluntarily, I explained. I had ambitions to become a newspaperman. I added that for the previous six months I’d telephoned the scores through to Grandstand and World of Sport on behalf of the local freelance agency and listened as professional writers dictated copy at the final whistle.

‘So you want to be a journalist?’ he asked, still bouncing the ball on the head of the racket, and then not waiting for an answer. ‘I thought about being a journalist once – well, for about thirty seconds. Would have been brilliant at it too. Can’t type, though. Can’t spell either. Can you spell?’

I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I lied.

He plucked the squash ball out of the air. ‘And what does your dad do? Is he a journalist?’

‘He’s a miner,’ I replied.

‘Votes Labour?’ he asked.

‘Always,’ I said.

‘What about your mam?’

‘Works part-time.’

‘Any brothers or sisters?’

‘Just me.’

‘Where were you born?’

‘Newcastle.’

‘Do you like any other sport.’

‘Cricket.’

I wondered where all this was leading. Wasn’t I supposed to be asking the questions? My palms began to sweat. I dragged them across the knees of my trousers, praying he wouldn’t notice.

Clough dropped the squash racket and the ball and leaned forward, as if trying to get a closer look at me. The ball rolled off the edge of the desk and began to bounce towards the door. He pretended not to be bothered.

‘Ooh,’ he said, wagging his finger. ‘Now that’s a very good start with me young man … North-East, working background, cricket. I bet your mam has dinner on the table when you get back home. And I bet she cleans your shoes and makes sure you have an ironed shirt every morning.’

I nodded in agreement, ignorant then of how powerfully influential his own mother had been, how much his upbringing in part mirrored my own.

‘Go on then,’ he said, ‘ask me a question. You’ve got twenty minutes. And we’ve just wasted two of them.’ Clough leant back in the chair, plonked his feet on the corner of the desk and tucked his hands behind his head, as if he was settling down for a siesta.

I looked at him for a moment, half-expecting him to change his mind about speaking to me. He was just a few weeks short of his forty-second birthday, fit and vigorous. His hair was healthily thick and swept back, his face lean and virtually unlined, the eyes challenging and alive. That familiar piercing, nasal voice was an octave or two higher than it finally became; the result, of course, of being soaked in alcohol.

I put down my orange juice, fiddled inside my briefcase and brought out the thick new notebook. Staring at it, he said: ‘I’m not filling all that for you!’

What struck me most back then was Clough’s supreme confidence, as if he could actually see what lay ahead of him: the League championship and the European Cups and vindication. He had been through three and a half years of violent turbulence – a stupidly impetuous resignation at Derby, an ill-judged decision to manage Third Division Brighton, the forty-four days he spent nursing Don Revie’s dubious inheritance at Leeds and the early traumas at struggling Forest – but he was well over the worst of it when I met him. He was swimming with the current again, and back with Peter Taylor. Forest were fifth in the Second Division. Promotion was seventeen matches away.

The wilderness period changed him, he told me many times later. Each embarrassed step through it taught him career-altering lessons. After Derby he learnt that resigning on a whim led to remorse and regret. After Brighton he learnt to be more careful about his career choices, for going there had been as grievous a mistake as leaving Derby. But it was at Leeds that his most profound transformation took place. He learnt that he needed Taylor beside him, that his abrasive approach had to be tempered, and, crucially, that personal wealth – and a lot of it – was more important than ever. He made a financially jewelled exit, which he repeatedly claimed to me was worth almost £100,000 (the equivalent today of around £850,000). However much he got, the money was critical to the way he managed his career later on.

Whenever Leeds came up in conversation – even in the season before he retired from Forest – Clough never tired of talking about both the raw anger he felt towards them, for what he regarded as the spineless collapse of the board at the first sign of player revolt, and the size of the pay-off he had been given.

Why Clough accepted the offer to manage Leeds isn’t difficult to fathom. Brighton had high ambitions but low resources. The club was going nowhere. Achieving success for them, he said to me on more than one occasion, was ‘like asking Lester Pig-gott to win the Derby on a Skegness donkey’. The nadir was Brighton’s 4–0 defeat to the part-timers of Walton & Hersham in an FA Cup replay. ‘I lost to a team that sounded like a firm of solicitors,’ he moaned.

Clough had panicked after leaving Derby: ‘I had too much time to think – and not enough brain to think with’ was the line he always used. He missed the glitz of the First Division. When Leeds rang him after Revie’s predictable appointment as England manager, it was like dropping a rope ladder to a man adrift at sea. Of course, Clough snatched at it.

He abhorred Revie and regarded Leeds, then League champions, as insular and rotten. But there was a perverse attraction in managing the club he had remorselessly criticised for half a dozen years or more. He accused them of being cheats and charlatans, cursed them for their gamesmanship. But now he would teach them how football ought to be played. He would do what Revie could not, and in the process, gain his revenge over the club.

Why Leeds picked Clough is beyond comprehension. His rapid sacking confirmed their gross error in appointing him in the first place. It was possibly the most ludicrously misguided hiring of a manager ever made by a football club’s board of directors. Revie managed methodically. He compiled dossiers and thought intently about the intricacies of the opposition. Clough managed through gut instinct. He dismissed dossiers as frippery and did not think, let alone talk, about opposition strengths or weaknesses. Revie prepared everything for Leeds, from travel to pre-match meals. Clough prepared almost nothing at all. He liked to ‘wing it’, as he told me.

For Revie, the matter of his succession was as straightforward as ABC: Anyone But Clough. He suggested either Bobby Robson as an external candidate, or Johnny Giles from within the existing staff. In appointing Clough, the Leeds board voted for seismic upheaval rather than calm continuity. The new manager did everything wrong. The very worst traits of Clough’s personality – the arrogant swagger, the confrontational manner, the insouciant impatience – all came to the surface.

Clough was still on holiday in Majorca when the team reported back for pre-season training – his first mistake. He found the dressing room wildly suspicious of him and almost uniformly hostile. His meagre placatory efforts, such as a telegram to the captain Billy Bremner, were viewed as patronising. It got worse too: a Charity Shield sending off for Bremner, just four points from six League matches, a rushed decision to try to sell players – Terry Cooper, David Harvey and Trevor Cherry among them – and, at the end, what amounted to a vote of no confidence in him. ‘The players,’ he complained, ‘have more meetings than the union at Ford.’

The vote was hardly any wonder. At his first team meeting, he told the players to ‘chuck your medals on the table –’ cos you won ’em by cheating.’ When I asked him about it, he was unrepentant: ‘Well, I meant it.’ Clough had to go, and go he did – with his pride punctured but with his wallet bulging.

Shortly after his sacking, I remember watching Clough being interviewed on TV alongside Revie. The hostility between them was lightning in the air; a decade of stored-up grievances added to the tension within the studio: Clough hated Revie, and Revie was appalled at what Clough had done in his brief tenure at Leeds.

Clough told me that he began to ‘hate’ Revie when he discovered him colluding with a referee after a match. Clough was convinced that Revie had ‘nobbled’ the referee. He had gone to watch Leeds and visited Revie in his office afterwards. He was standing behind the door, out of sight, when the referee tapped on it. Clough recalled: ‘I heard the ref say to Revie, “Was that all right for you, Mr Revie?” ’ Revie, Clough added, said a nervous ‘marvellous’ in reply and waved him away, like a lord dismissing his butler. He carried on talking to Clough as if nothing had happened. ‘There was something about it that told me the ref had been given something – and given Revie something in return,’ said Clough. ‘I knew Revie was bent.’

Clough won the TV contest comfortably on points, his 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 Clough; less strident, and in not so much of a hurry.

Having thought about recruiting Clough after his 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 retyped it a dozen times.

Clough declared he wanted to play entertainingly, called Peter Taylor ‘the best spotter of talent’ he had ever seen, and lamented Forest’s meagre gates because, he argued, ‘the people of Nottingham wanted [success] handed to them on a plate.’

As I left, he said: ‘Come back and see me soon, son. Have a Scotch next time. You’ll enjoy it.’