by Phil Rostron
WE ARE THE DAMNED UNITED
THE REAL STORY OF BRIAN CLOUGH AT LEEDS UNITED
Phil Rostron
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FOR ROWLAND,
A PROPER FOOTBALL FAN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Grateful thanks go to the following for their generous help: Frank Gray, Peter Lorimer, Eddie Gray, Gordon McQueen, Joe Jordan, Peter Hampton, Terry Yorath, Duncan McKenzie, David Harvey, Jimmy Armfield, Peter Reid, Hugh McIlmoyle, Gary Newbon, Tommy Docherty and John Wray.
Also, in regard to copyright matters, thanks to Brian Viner, Paul Newman and The Independent; Paul Napier, Phil Hay and the Yorkshire Evening Post; Gerry Ormonde and the Dublin Evening Herald; Robert Galvin and the National Football Museum Hall of Fame; Duncan Hamilton and Harper Perennial for permission to reproduce extracts from Provided You Don’t Kiss Me; the Sunday Times; Barney Ronay and The Guardian; Delia Monk, Bryan Henesey and the Nottingham Evening Post; Ed Reed and the Huddersfield Examiner; Ian Murtagh and The Journal; Dennis Signy; Rob Stewart; the Manchester Evening News; the Daily Mail; and the websites mightyleeds.co.uk, thisisderbyshire.co.uk, ozwhitelufc.net.au, bwfc.co.uk and leedsfans.org.uk.
Thanks to Iain MacGregor of Mainstream for commissioning the book, the Mainstream team for their exemplary professionalism, Phil Hay, one of the top two football writers outside of Fleet Street, for his camaraderie and painstaking revision of the manuscript, Neil Hodgkinson, editorial director of Cumbrian Newspapers, for his trust, support and understanding, and finally to my lovely wife Caroline for everything.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Frank Gray
Introduction
1 Changing of the Guard
2 ‘Forget Revie’
3 Character Assassinations
4 Dirty Leeds?
5 Sign Here
6 Uncharitable
7 Rain on our Parade
8 Perspectives
9 Hard Times
10 Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
11 The Hack
12 He Met Me Once
13 Do as I Say
14 A New Broom
15 Ups and Downs
16 Fallen Empires
17 Pure Genius
Postscript: In Search of Brian Clough
Where Are They Now?
FOREWORD
I write the foreword to this insightful analysis of Brian Clough’s 44 days at Leeds United within 24 hours of the famous Yorkshire club being beaten by a non-league side for the first time in its history – a 1–0 reverse against Histon in the second round of the FA Cup – and Nottingham Forest creeping off the bottom of the Coca-Cola Championship table by virtue of a 1–0 win over Barnsley. How times change in the world of football that we so love and adore! Some years previously, I represented both Leeds and Forest in finals of the biggest club competition in the world, the European Cup, when the clubs were in their pomp.
If I impressed Brian Clough during his spell managing Leeds in 1974, then it wasn’t immediately apparent, because he didn’t include me in his plans at Elland Road. In fact, I had become a little disillusioned and was actively looking to move on, with both Birmingham City and Ipswich Town showing an interest in my services. In the event, some five years elapsed before I was to leave Leeds in a £500,000 deal that took me to Clough’s Forest.
When Clough arrived at Leeds, I was one of a number of younger players tasked with maintaining the club’s success in the aftermath of the Don Revie era. The great Revie team was ageing and breaking up, and the club was looking to the likes of me, Gordon McQueen, Joe Jordan and others to keep them high in the pecking order. I had joined the club, at which my older brother Eddie had already made a name for himself, as a 17-year-old midfielder and made my debut in 1973, scoring a goal in that first match. Regular left-back Terry Cooper had suffered a very nasty leg break, which was how my big chance came about. However, I was still very much learning the game then and I soon made way at number 3 for Trevor Cherry, though I was at least invited to go with the squad to Wembley for the 1973 FA Cup final against Sunderland.
I quickly found my patience being tested, because, with Trevor settled into a team that went 29 league games unbeaten and won the Division One title at the end of the 1973–74 season, my chances were strictly limited. However, a fairly regular place in the team came along and the 1975 European Cup final between Leeds United and Bayern Munich in Paris was something of a big-occasion baptism of fire, because it ended with our fans rioting after a highly controversial defeat. When I was playing in Clough’s Nottingham Forest team, I was privileged to become the first player to represent two different English clubs in the European Cup final. I’m still the only player to have done so! That time, in 1980, I got a winner’s medal after a 1–0 victory over a Hamburg team featuring Kevin Keegan.
I suppose Leeds were always in my heart and in 1981 I returned to Elland Road under Allan Clarke, only for the club to suffer relegation and ‘Sniffer’ to lose his job. My brother Eddie took over as manager and I played under him for four years without us quite being able to get out of the Second Division. I left Leeds for Sunderland in 1985 with a career record at Elland Road of 396 appearances and 35 goals and was at least able to help Sunderland to promotion from the third tier.
Internationally, I first played for Scotland against Switzerland in 1976 (a 1–0 victory). I was capped again in 1978 but didn’t make it onto the squad for the World Cup in Argentina. Four years later, I was selected for the Scotland squad for the 1982 World Cup in Spain and played against New Zealand, Brazil and the USSR in the group stages, though that was the end of the road for us. I finished up with 32 caps and can safely say that in my time as a footballer I witnessed a wide spectrum of managerial ability and talent.
In analysing why a liaison between a club as mighty as Leeds United and one of the greatest managers the game has ever seen in Brian Clough should be doomed to spectacular failure, one major reason stands out above all others. It is the fact that Clough was at Leeds without the support and guidance of his great ally and assistant, Peter Taylor. They were a brilli
ant partnership and it was unfortunate for Clough that when Leeds came calling Taylor preferred to stay at Brighton. With Taylor at his side at Elland Road, the situation might have been much calmer. Taylor would have been a steadying influence and would have taken on board much of the disharmony within the camp, shielding Clough from it. Who knows what might have happened had Clough stayed longer, but the club went on to reach a European Cup final that season with the same squad of players who had won the league title 12 months earlier. There was no need for drastic changes, though Clough seemed to have an agenda to make them. Perhaps if he’d managed to settle things down, we might have won the European Cup.
However, somewhat cast adrift, he hurriedly brought in people he knew, like John McGovern and John O’Hare, his trainer Jimmy Gordon and striker Duncan McKenzie, and although these were ‘his’ people, none of them was Peter Taylor. In retrospect, Clough admitted that he had been too rash in his approach to the job. He acted too quickly. He tried to change things in a blur of activity and he later accepted that this had been a mistake. I know he regretted it.
The accusation has been levelled that the players he inherited didn’t respond to his management methods, but first impressions matter and their first impressions were of a man accusing them of being cheats, of someone ordering them to throw their medals in a bin because they had been won unfairly, of someone telling a fine but injured player that he would have been shot had he been a horse. Nevertheless, a lot of players would have liked the chance to play under him for much longer than those 44 days he was in charge. Though it wasn’t the case at Leeds, nearly everybody who played under Clough at Derby County and Forest liked and respected him, and if the whole scenario at Leeds could be replayed with Taylor at his side, I am sure it would be a whole lot different.
Like most in the game, I was saddened by the later estrangement between Clough and Taylor, because they had become one of the enduring football partnerships of modern times. Clough took offence when in 1983 Taylor, as Derby’s manager, signed his player John Robertson from Forest. The deal was done while Clough, who had been in the process of drawing up a new contract for his favourite winger, was away on a rambling holiday, and he felt Taylor had gone behind his back. That they never made up was another of Clough’s regrets.
Players are in the game to get to the highest level and win trophies, and I hung up my boots in 1992 having figured in not only two European Cup finals but also the European Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1973, when Leeds lost 1–0 to AC Milan at the Kaftanzoglio Stadium in Thessaloniki, Greece, the European Super Cup in 1979, when Forest beat Barcelona 2–1 on aggregate, and 1980, when Forest were beaten by Valencia on the away-goals rule, and the Intercontinental Cup in 1980, when Forest were beaten 1–0 by Uruguayan side Nacional at the National Stadium in Tokyo. I was on the bench when Leeds were beaten by Sunderland in the 1973 FA Cup final and towards the end of my career I was a member of the Sunderland squad who took the 1987–88 Third Division title and won successive league titles with Darlington in 1989–90 (Conference) and 1990–91 (Fourth Division).
I was with Clough at Forest for only two years but that was long enough to become entangled in what, for many people, is one of life’s mysteries: the secret of his success. I’m not sure there was one. Certainly, his involvement in training was rudimentary and elementary – just the basics. He didn’t do a lot of coaching and when he became involved it was usually centred on a five-a-side game in which he insisted on the ball being kept down on the floor in a simple passing game. He would tell defenders it was their job to defend, midfielders that they were there both to shield the defence and feed the forwards, and forwards that they were there to score goals. Very basic. Very simple. And it was probably this simplicity that was the key. No doubt he would be of the opinion that football is an easy game sometimes made difficult by over-elaborate coaching.
Having been at Leeds since I was a boy and played nearly four hundred games for them in two spells, I obviously hold the club in greater affection than I do Forest, with whom I spent just two seasons. You can’t help but wonder if the decline of Leeds in the late 1970s would have happened if Clough had had an extended run at Elland Road, and the balance of probabilities in view of what he later achieved at Forest is that they would have thrived and prospered rather than sinking into the abyss. Having managed Darlington, Farnborough Town, Grays Athletic, Woking and Basingstoke Town, I know how difficult the job can be. More often than not, Clough made the very best of it. Clough’s life in football was nothing if not colourful, and the Leeds episode must go down as a short but fascinating period of failure in an otherwise highly successful career.
Frank Gray
INTRODUCTION
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job.
Brian Clough
To understand the situation that Brian Clough found himself in as manager of Leeds United, one has first to analyse the two decades at the club leading up to his appointment and the early, unlikely successes that had brought him the opportunity. In particular, a look at Don Revie’s tenure at the club – considered by fans and players alike a golden age of stability and silverware – is revealing. Clough’s time in charge was a complete contrast, and it would have dramatic effects that are still being discussed and dramatised today.
This book does not intend to dwell on the portrayal of events in the film The Damned United. That is a film based on a work of fiction by a very successful writer who knows his craft and has a vision of what he wants his story to be about. My aim is simply to discuss the details of Brian Clough’s 44-day reign at Leeds United with many of the players who were there at the time, as well as others connected to the club. This is not to answer Clough’s critics, or Revie’s for that matter, but simply to discover what the men who were there at the time thought of the situation and how they reacted to it. Obviously, some key figures, such as Billy Bremner, are no longer with us, so I have researched their views on events through interviews, autobiographies and other sources.
I discovered that very little is known about Clough’s six league games in charge of the team and what transpired in those fixtures. I believe this tells a story in itself, as they provide the background to the internal struggle that was going on at the top of the club’s management structure. I was therefore very fortunate to discover contemporary match reports in the archives of the Yorkshire Evening Post, which the Post have very kindly allowed me to reproduce for the first time within this narrative.
I hope you find the story both illuminating and enjoyable, as it concerns some of the greatest players of the era, indeed of any era, at loggerheads with arguably one of the greatest managers of all time. What went wrong? Well, read on and find out what the players themselves have to say.
When in March 1961 a Leeds United board of directors alarmed by the club’s slide to the lower reaches of the Second Division ran out of patience with their manager, Jack Taylor, it was to an influential member of their playing staff that they turned, in the hope of having identified greater potential than that held by Taylor to resurrect the failing West Yorkshire outfit. Don Revie, the man in question, had been signed from Sunderland by Taylor’s predecessor, Bill Lambton, as a 31-year-old ex-England inside-forward, costing a significant £14,000.
Four months after Revie’s appointment as player-manager, one of the best post-war English goal-poachers, by the name of Brian Clough, made the national headlines with a high-profile transfer. The Teesside legend, who had set a scoring record of 204 goals in 222 matches for Middlesbrough, was sold to regional rivals Sunderland for £55,000. He would go on to replicate his incredible strike rate at his new club, scoring 54 goals in 61 league matches. Had it not been for a horrific accident that in effect prematurely curtailed his career, Sunderland and Clough would have enjoyed a happier time together and would surely have won promotion to the top flight. However, events dictated that the club had to finish the season without him, and it failed at the very last hurdle by a si
ngle point.
On Boxing Day 1962, and with his goal tally for the season already at a sparkling 28, Clough tangled with goalkeeper Chris Harker of Bury on a terrible playing surface. They collided heavily as Clough overstretched to poke a shot at goal. It was immediately obvious to those watching that Clough had sustained a serious injury. Prostrate in the mud, he could barely move his right leg. What we see today as the curse of the professional sportsman had happened to him: Clough had badly torn his cruciate ligament. In the 1960s, this type of injury meant the end of many a player’s career. Although he recovered in eighteen months and ran out three more times for Sunderland – who were by that time playing in the First Division – the reaction of the leg told him that his professional playing days were gone. Those three games were the only time he played in the elite flight.
The obvious question for a player of his calibre and ambition was what could he possibly do next in football? This was the love of his life, after all. Although offered employment outside of the game, he wanted to be involved. The Sunderland manager George Hardwick took him under his wing and allowed him to coach and run the youth team. It was in this sphere that Clough first demonstrated the leadership qualities that would take him into full-time management and eventually lead to honours in the top flight of the domestic game as well as in Europe. Ultimately, it became legend that he was the best manager England never had.
The youngsters in his charge were being guided by a genius whose incomparable record was 251 goals in 274 senior matches. In his autobiography Clough, he described himself as the finest goal-scorer in Britain and one of the best the game had ever seen. Who could argue with that? Who would have wanted to?
In October 1965, 30-year-old Clough became the Football League’s youngest manager when he took the helm at lowly Hartlepools United (later renamed Hartlepool United). Little did the football world realise that this was the beginning of a turbulent managerial career spanning three decades and punctuated by momentous events and controversial statements. Clough’s first decision was a significant one: he brought in Peter Taylor, a friend and colleague since his spell at Middlesbrough and then manager of Burton Albion, as his assistant. Nottingham-born Taylor had been signed as a goalkeeper by Nottingham Forest in 1945, played for Coventry City between 1950 and 1955, and then moved to Middlesbrough, where, as a reserve goalkeeper, he had first encountered a young Brian Clough. In one of the first great examples of the talent-spotting for which Taylor became famed, he constantly sang the praises of the goal machine in the ranks. After 140 appearances for Middlesbrough over 6 years, Taylor moved to Port Vale in 1961. In October 1962, he was offered the manager’s job at Burton and led them to triumph in the Southern League Cup in 1964.