We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  No player must under any circumstances make statements to the press appertaining to Club matters without the prior permission of the Manager.

  On the one hand, a caring, arm-round-the shoulder approach; on the other, a hard-hitting list of don’t-dos. Come what may, there was going to be a stark change in the atmosphere at Elland Road. The appointment promised to be interesting.

  2

  ‘FORGET REVIE’

  I call myself ‘Big Head’ just to remind myself not to be.

  Brian Clough

  Well, he’d been appointed. But where was he? On holiday with his family somewhere. And that’s where Brian Clough was staying until he was good and ready to grace Elland Road, home of the champions, with his presence. The disdain Clough had shown for the club in the past meant that he was far from likely to receive an enthusiastic welcome. Peter Lorimer relates: ‘I first came across him and discovered his true feelings when, in the early 1970s, I won the Sports Personality of the Year award at the Yorksport dinner under the auspices of Yorkshire Television at the Queens Hotel in Leeds. This was a prestigious award, voted for by Yorkshire Television viewers, that had previously been won by the Formula One racing driver Jackie Stewart and the golfer Nick Faldo. There was a lot of kudos attached to it and there were always important figures invited to present the awards. On this particular occasion, the man handing over the trophies was no less than the prime minister of the day, Yorkshireman Harold Wilson. The guest speaker was Brian Clough.

  ‘I duly received my award from the Prime Minister but missed out on the pleasure of listening to Old Big ’Ead on this Sunday evening because we had a cup replay against Manchester United at Villa Park the following evening, and while Don kindly allowed me to collect the award, he ensured that there was a car waiting outside to whisk me straight to Villa Park to join up with the rest of the squad. I was therefore in blissful ignorance about what was such a diatribe that it quickly gathered notoriety for its ridiculous content. These were the days when there were no mobile telephones, of course, and thank goodness for that, because that night the phone at our team hotel never stopped ringing with requests from reporters wanting to speak to someone about Mr Clough’s outburst concerning Leeds United and me at the dinner in Leeds.

  ‘Even before he was due to make his scheduled speech, he got up and told a packed auditorium that he had sat there and listened to a load of codswallop about the greatness of Leeds United and the brilliance of Peter Lorimer. It was time now, he asserted, that he had his say. He had had enough of being made to sit through all this bullshit. But before he embarked on his speech, he said, the audience could sit there and wait patiently, just as he had done, until he had paid a visit to the lavatory. Well, of course, with the Prime Minister and all the local dignitaries of the city of Leeds being there, this sudden announcement of an unscheduled break in the proceedings did not go down too well. When he returned, he launched full throttle into an undisguised attack on Leeds United. Calling us “cheats”, he said that we had never won anything fairly.

  ‘As for me, he held that the Sports Personality of the Year award had gone to the wrong man. I wasn’t a sportsman, he said. I was a cheat. I was always diving. Always trying to get the opposition into trouble with the referee. It amounted to a full-frontal assault on both the club and me, in front of a largely partisan audience in our home city. Of course, he got shouted down. People were on their feet and telling him to sit down. The boos started and he never got to finish his speech. It must have been quite funny on the night. I wish I’d been there. I quite enjoy a bit of banter and, of course, people are entitled to their opinions. There is no way I would have responded, however. I would merely have enjoyed the surrealness of it all.’

  This, as many within the footballing community came to understand, was Clough’s unique and unequivocal style. Someone who knew by word of mouth about this reputation was the much-travelled Hugh McIlmoyle, who is rated by many as the best header of a football the game has ever seen and scored a career total of 180 goals in some 500 games for Leicester, Rotherham, Carlisle, Wolves, Bristol City, Carlisle again, Middlesbrough, Preston, Morton and Carlisle for a third time in a career spanning 1959–75. Like Clough, McIlmoyle was a Middlesbrough hero. In the 1970–71 season, he and John Hickton were the scourge of Division Two defences, plundering 38 goals between them for Middlesbrough. For McIlmoyle, scoring goals was second nature, as simple as peeling an orange, and yet there is awe in his voice when he considers the predatory exploits of the man who preceded him as a Boro striker.

  At Ayresome Park on 26 September 1970, McIlmoyle produced such an outstanding performance in a 6–2 defeat of Queens Park Rangers, who featured swanky players like Rodney Marsh and Terry Venables, that it has always been known on Teesside as ‘the McIlmoyle Match’. Boro were two goals down inside five minutes and floundering until McIlmoyle, a Scot, took the game by the scruff of the neck. Scoring two bullet headers and laying on a hat-trick for Hickton, McIlmoyle so wound up the rattled visitors that there were to be personal repercussions. The striker ended the game with a badly broken nose, inflicted by a head-butt from QPR defender Dave Clement.

  Boro’s fans had not seen a one-man display like it for a long time; not since, in fact, the glory days at the club of that other prolific striker Brian Clough, who had departed in acrimonious circumstances nine years previously.

  ‘Brian Clough was so good a manager,’ says McIlmoyle, ‘that his playing career is barely mentioned. But when you consider that he scored 204 goals in 222 games over a 10-year period at Boro – and five of those came in one game, a 9–0 thrashing of Brighton on the opening day of the 1958–59 season – then he has to have been just about the best striker Britain has ever seen. That record almost defies belief.

  ‘When I joined Middlesbrough, the left-back and captain there, Gordon Jones, had played with Cloughie, and he told me that he was a difficult person if not to like then certainly to get to know. He was something of a loner. Normally, footballers mix quite well, and that was evident in the 1950s in the fact that players would enjoy a game of bridge or a round of golf together. But Gordon’s view was that Clough was a bad mixer. He could come across as selfish, aloof and arrogant. He certainly was not well liked in the dressing-room. Where the rest of the boys would get changed together and exchange banter, this isolated figure would be in a cubicle on his own. His one close friend in the club was the goalkeeper, Peter Taylor.

  ‘When I joined, there also remained a lot of bitterness in the club about the way Clough departed Boro for a new career with local rivals Sunderland. They felt he had let Middlesbrough down. In those days, players didn’t move between clubs like they do now. Many were one-club men, and it was seen as an act of betrayal if they turned their back on one club in favour of another. People thought he’d abandoned Middlesbrough. The £55,000 transfer fee was a record at the time, and you do wonder what figure such a devastating finisher would have commanded in today’s inflated market. I think that as far as his personality goes, he was the same as a young player at Middlesbrough as he was when he became a manager: abrasive, self-centred and opinionated. I was told that Clough had created friction within the camp by publicly accusing his defence of deliberately leaking goals. This led to punch-ups and, ultimately, to several members of the team signing a petition to get him demoted as captain. He was a complex person. But both as a player and manager, he was consistently able to produce the goods. He didn’t just let his mouth run away with him. He knew what he was talking about.

  ‘If ever you did see him, he was never quiet. He was the sort of bloke who had to say something. He couldn’t just walk by. If he saw an old woman crossing the road he’d have to help her along, chatting from pavement to pavement. And if he saw somebody doing something wrong, he’d be just as quick to tell them off. I liked him. I did. And I’m sure everybody in the media liked him, too. He was news and he didn’t shy away from making it. I liked the way he called a spade a bloody shovel, and I think anybody w
ho engaged with him on that level couldn’t fail to get along with him.’

  There were elements of the ridiculous about Clough; his way of operating could seem thoroughly peculiar and was unique to him. Though McIlmoyle never played under Clough, he witnessed his quirky personality on numerous occasions. ‘When Clough was managing Derby,’ he recalls, ‘I went down there as a Carlisle player in 1967 and we beat them. In the tunnel afterwards, there was no need for him to speak to me, because I didn’t even know him, but he said, “Well played, young man. You gave our centre-half the runaround today, and that’s no mean feat because he’s going to be the England centre-half sooner rather than later.” This was Roy McFarland. Clough must have been disappointed at being beaten at home but still found a kindly word for an opposing player.

  ‘The next time I met him was at the Scotch Corner Hotel, where the A1 meets the A66. I was a Middlesbrough player by this time, and I’d got off to such a good start there that the local newspapers had begun doing articles comparing Clough and me. The routine was that I would drive to the hotel from home to be picked up by the Middlesbrough team coach. Derby must have been meeting there too, and as I was sitting alone drinking a cup of coffee, Clough presented himself in front of me and said, “I’ve been reading in the papers that you are a better player than I ever was. Let me tell you that you will never be as good a player as I was. And you’ll never score as many goals as I did.” I said, “Well you’re probably right, Mr Clough,” to which he came back, “I know I’m right, young man. On both counts.” Then, as quickly and unexpectedly as he had arrived, he was gone. In the normal course of events, you’d expect someone coming up to you when you’re sitting there minding your own business to introduce themselves, exchange a pleasantry or two and then say what they’ve got to say. Not Cloughie. He was straight in there. That’s the way he was. He’d come out with these one-liners and you’d be so taken aback that you didn’t have a chance to respond.

  ‘I recall training for a couple of weeks at Leicester when I was carrying an injury as a Middlesbrough player. I knew a lot of the backroom staff at Leicester and they were telling me how Clough had come over from Derby to buy David Nish, a very talented left-back, and wanted at the same time to buy Peter Shilton. This is where you marvel at Clough’s audacity. Apparently, he pulled up in the car park, breezed through reception without a word, climbed the stairs to the boardroom and without so much as a cursory knock at the door simply burst in and demanded: “Right, then, how much do you want for David Nish? I am not leaving this boardroom until you have sold David Nish to me.” Then and there they sold him, actually for a then British transfer record of £225,000. Nish was to go on and win England caps, once again typifying Clough’s eye for a player he knew he could mould into something a bit special. But the way he bought him was outrageous. You imagine, from his ability to gatecrash a board meeting like that, that he would have the daring to romp unannounced into a television studio and commandeer the whole network!’

  For Lorimer, however, his first experience of Clough’s forthright demeanour did not inspire optimism about a future friendship. Clough was indeed outrageous. And now he was Lorimer’s boss – in absentia.

  ‘In came Cloughie, only not straight away,’ says Lorimer. ‘He was on a family holiday in Majorca when his appointment was announced and he let it be known that he would arrive at Leeds when he was good and ready. He was certainly not going to interrupt a holiday abroad and everyone could just wait. Straight away, then, he showed no great desire or commitment, which you could perhaps understand, though even then only to a minimal extent, if you were talking about a third- or fourth-tier club with only naked ambition at stake. With Leeds, you were talking one of the biggest clubs in Britain, Europe and the world. We had just won the league title, for goodness sake, with a European campaign beckoning. What message, then, did “Leeds can wait” give out? This was no doubt his way of letting everyone know that he wasn’t daunted by the task at hand. “Leeds? So what?”’

  Big defender Gordon McQueen, who made his United debut against Derby in March 1973, recalls: ‘If it was no great surprise when Don Revie walked out of the door at Leeds, then it was certainly a huge shock to see Brian Clough strolling in through the other door. Stories had been circulating for some time linking Don with Everton and various other clubs, and the feeling was that he was perhaps looking for a big pay day, which duly came his way when he was offered the England job.

  ‘But Brian Clough as his replacement? There was incredulity around the place given the bitter rivalry between himself and Leeds, the disparaging remarks he had made about the club, the manager and the players. Revie had loved to beat Clough’s sides and vice versa, and Clough’s appointment at Leeds had a distinctly uneasy feel about it from the start. From my own perspective, I was just a young lad of 22 when Clough took over and not so set in my ways as the older players like Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer and Eddie Gray. Clough had already made a big name for himself in the game through winning the championship with Derby County, and for me it was quite exciting to have someone with such a high profile at the helm.

  ‘Cloughie was always fairly positive towards me. I remember Billy Bremner saying to me as soon as Clough arrived, “It won’t be long before you’re in there asking for a pay rise.” Too right! There were no agents in those days and you fended for yourself. Here was I, just a young boy from Scotland in amongst a World Cup-winner in Jack Charlton, the Scotland captain in Billy Bremner and a whole squad packed with international players, and if you were going to be starry-eyed, this was the place for it. Of course I was going to dare to ask the new manager for a pay rise and he duly delivered – a tenner a week I think. That was the bumptious youngster at work. I had no preconceptions, no fear, really. But I could understand the antipathy towards the new manager from these giants of the game who had built their club into the most feared side in the land and one of the most respected throughout Europe and the world. Cloughie was something of a loose cannon. It was a staggering decision to appoint him, and the Leeds board of the time had a lot to answer for. Both Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner were good candidates for the job, and maybe the directors couldn’t make up their minds between the two and fudged the issue by going instead for someone with a track record in management.’

  As the squad awaited Clough’s arrival, the media were having a field day. Testimony to his lifetime’s work as a humble journalist and seeker after truth at Leeds United are sufficient newspaper cuttings to wallpaper every room of John Wray’s neat detached house in the Leeds suburb of Horsforth. Meticulously kept over a period spanning more than four decades, they amount to a seamless historical commentary on a football club that, whether it intends to or not, whether it likes it or not, has for many years been in the habit of producing newsworthy items on an almost daily basis. It is a club with a long tradition of attracting publicity, whether it be for the right or wrong reasons, and it has rarely failed to live up to the advice given to John as a young man setting out to report on them. ‘If you’re covering Leeds United,’ a senior journalist told him, ‘you won’t have to go looking for stories. They’ll come looking for you.’

  The Clough episode gave rise to some of the most colourful to emerge from Elland Road over the years, and few are better placed to speak with authority on the subject than John. The headlines and John’s words, from his reports for the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, tell the story as vividly as a motion picture:

  IT’S OFFICIAL – FA ASK FOR REVIE’S RELEASE

  The Football Association have officially asked Leeds United to release Don Revie for the England manager’s job, though neither he nor the Leeds board of directors will breathe a word about this not altogether unexpected development.

  DELIGHTED CLOUGH TELLS OF ‘EXCITING PROSPECT’

  In his first exclusive interview since becoming Leeds United’s manager Brian Clough talked to me about the ‘exciting prospect’ of inheriting League football’s top job in management. ‘Leeds United is
a superbly run club with immense talent both in the dressing-room and among the backroom staff. I don’t envisage any problems.’

  LEEDS ALSO WANTED TO RECRUIT TAYLOR

  Leeds United, jubilant at clinching the services of Brighton manager Brian Clough to succeed Don Revie, were at the same time bemoaning their failure to land Clough’s assistant Peter Taylor. Until today it was thought the pair were inseparable and when Leeds chairman Manny Cussins travelled to Brighton yesterday to persuade Brighton to part with Clough he had a mandate from his directors to get Taylor too.

  ENIGMA WHO WILL MOVE IN WITH REVIE’S GHOST

  Some call Brian Clough ‘Rent-a-Gob’. Others are even less complimentary about the man Leeds United have chosen to succeed Don Revie. Yet it is impossible to sum up in one phrase the enigma that is Clough. Many have tried and failed. Indeed it is my experience that the critics who have pilloried him most are those who have never met him.

  CLOUGH BREEZES IN FOR HIS FIRST DAY

  A bronzed Brian Clough breezed into Elland Road to start his new job as manager of League champions Leeds United today and immediately set about making up for lost time. Shrugging aside a suggestion that he should have been with his players ten days ago when he was appointed manager, instead of flying back to Majorca to continue his holiday, Clough said: ‘No one has yet accused me of that to my face so I’m not prepared to discuss it.’

  Wray, who charts his career in the media in the hugely entertaining 2008 book Leeds United and a Life in the Press Box, recalls: ‘My first sighting of Clough at Leeds was when he drove into work on his first day – I remember it being a very wet morning – in what I thought was a Mercedes but turned out to be an Audi. Embarrassingly, I filed a story mentioning a Mercedes, but my excuse was that the logos were very similar! It was just like a Hollywood legend arriving, with a battery of cameras and media figures from all over the country forming a real scrum. It was such a big story. He got out of the car with his two little lads and Manny Cussins, the chairman, welcomed him. They walked towards the main entrance. Manny was first of all to show his new manager the dressing-rooms. The media pack followed and it all became a bit unwieldy. Clough took umbrage, turned on Manny and boomed, “So this is how you run your football club, is it?” They were off on the wrong foot straight away.’