We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  ‘There were lots of rumours about who was going to succeed Don, with Johnny Giles mentioned very early in the proceedings, but it emerged that the board were going to go outside the club for their appointment, and Brian Clough turned out to be the man. I think they sensed there might be problems if they were to give the job to Johnny, because Billy Bremner had also wanted it. The situation actually recurred after Clough was fired, with Johnny again looking set to get the job and then Billy applying for it. That presented the board with a dilemma, because they didn’t want to upset either party.

  ‘Leeds and Clough were a marriage made in hell, largely because of the criticism he had hurled at the club. Lots of things were wrong. As soon as he was appointed, he went on holiday, so he was late turning up for the job. He was late for training nearly every day he was there, because he still lived in Derby. Occasionally, he stayed over in a hotel, but most of the time he was commuting. He’d sometimes arrive at Elland Road when training was almost over, which did not go down well with the players. Syd Owen, the chief coach, felt snubbed when Clough brought in Jimmy Gordon, and again the players did not like that state of affairs.

  ‘It wasn’t easy for the press either. Reporting for an evening paper, I badly needed to speak to him early in the day if I wanted his quotes to make the first edition, but he wasn’t arriving at the ground until after 10 a.m., sometimes 11 a.m. We had to adopt the mentality that we would have to get things out of him one day for the following day’s publication, and the whole thing became a bit of a nightmare. Sometimes you couldn’t get him at all because he was so busy with other things. Of course, he, as a new manager, must have had all sorts of things on his mind, and you hoped that the situation would settle down into a routine that would include us within a few weeks.

  ‘My story about the rumours that Syd Owen was prepared to leave Leeds annoyed Clough, however, and I got a call from him saying, “Get your arse down here as quick as you can, young man. We’ve got things to discuss.” He tore me off a strip despite my protestations that I had actually toned the story down. This didn’t wash with him at all. But then, out of the blue and to my total surprise, he proceeded to give me two exclusives. The first concerned his plans for the club and how he intended to operate, and the other was about the three players he was about to sign: McGovern, O’Hare and McKenzie. Those signings created resentment within the squad. They thought there was nothing wrong with the team to start with, and couldn’t understand why he felt the need to bring these new players in.

  ‘I think Brian was really good at managing a team that hadn’t done a lot and moulding them into a superb side, but with a team like Leeds at that time, who had seen it all and done it all, he was completely lost. That Leeds team was used to Don’s methods, and Brian’s were different. In a way, those players were at fault, because they were inflexible, unwilling to take new ideas on board. They would be of the mindset that there was no need for new ideas because they already had a successful formula. But there is an argument that they would have been even more successful if Don had let them off the leash and allowed them to express themselves a little bit more rather than being ultra-cautious, which was one of their characteristic traits. The signing of Duncan McKenzie, whom you couldn’t coach or control and who was a flair player and a free spirit, was a strong hint that Clough planned to address that aspect of Leeds’ game, and who knows where that might have taken them?

  ‘I sensed the Clough sacking coming. There had been so many rumblings behind the scenes, with several players telling the chairman that it just wasn’t working and couldn’t go on for much longer. From my perspective, there were titbits and snippets from players that could not be used on the record but which were useful as background information, and I began asking myself the question: how much longer can this go on?

  ‘Clough had become a little bit snappy. Don Warters was on holiday when Clough took up the job and by the time he got back Clough had just about got his feet under the table. On his first day back at work, Don called at the ground to introduce himself, and that morning the Daily Mail had done a piece saying that seven or eight players were refusing to sign their contracts because they couldn’t get on with Cloughie. Don had a copy of the Mail and needed to check the story’s accuracy, so after the initial introductions and swapping of pleasantries, Don asked Clough about it. He bristled. “Don’t ask me questions like that. You insult me with that type of question,” he snapped. “If you ask me that fucking question again, I’ll kick you over that fucking stand.” But Don, like a good journalist, persisted, insisting that he would have to write a story for that day’s paper and saying that if this story was wrong, then here was the manager’s chance to refute it. Clough said, “Well, it’s wrong. In actual fact there are ten or twelve players who aren’t signing!” A delighted Don, now with an even better story, said, “Thanks very much,” and hurried off.

  ‘Some time after Clough had left Leeds and linked up with Nottingham Forest, Leeds were playing Forest and there was the usual post-match media conference. I was standing right at the back. Clough had answered three or four questions before he suddenly spotted me. “You’ve no need to stand there, young man,” he said. “You did nothing for me while I was at Elland Road, so why should I do anything for you?” It was a really embarrassing put-down and, I thought, well out of order, especially as I had gone out of my way in his time at Leeds to give up a day off to help him to house-hunt.

  ‘I felt it would help cement a relationship if I were to show him round the area, since I knew it very well and he knew it not at all. When I got down to the ground, he was watching cricket on television. England were playing New Zealand, and I knew that he had a love of the game. He was there in his chair, in his tracksuit top and yellow shorts as usual, and I thought, “Is he going to look at houses dressed like this? Surely not.”

  ‘“Pour yourself a beer,” he said. “We’ll watch a few overs.” About three hours and several pints later, neither of us was in any fit state to go house-hunting, and at four o’clock he said, “I think we’ll call it a day, don’t you?” When I got home – by taxi – I told Helen the story and she was furious. “We could have gone shopping,” she said. “Wait until I see that Brian Clough!” You know, maybe at that stage he’d realised there wasn’t much point in hunting for a house because he might well be on his bike at any time.

  ‘It was a nightmare at the time for all concerned. The whole episode must have been an awful blow to his personal pride. If the Leeds directors had been more patient, Clough would have got rid of the ageing players and replaced them and built his own side. He might have been impatient in trying to get started with that too quickly. It would probably have worked eventually, but the Leeds board had been used to the club being right up there at the top, and they weren’t prepared to risk a fall. When Jimmy Armfield, Clough’s successor, was sacked, they hadn’t been outside the top ten – but nonetheless he was replaced. That shows how demanding they were. They really did panic about the results under Brian not being good and about most of the players being in revolt. They felt they had to nip the situation in the bud and get rid.

  ‘Nottingham Forest were the beneficiaries of that decision, because what he achieved there was truly extraordinary. He did, however, shoot himself in the foot at Leeds. Maybe once he realised that Peter Taylor wouldn’t be joining him and saw the players’ attitude towards him, he wanted a get-out and some of his actions were calculated to get him the sack. But who knows what went on in that mind of his?’

  12

  HE MET ME ONCE

  I’ve missed him. He used to make me laugh. He was the best defuser of a situation I have ever known. I hope he’s all right.

  Brian Clough on Peter Taylor

  By the time they reached the crossroads that pointed one way to Brighton and the other to Leeds, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor had been colleagues, friends and bosom buddies for almost 20 years. Through playing days together at Middlesbrough and as a managerial duo at Har
tlepools, Derby and, briefly, Brighton, they had built a partnership that appeared as unbreakable as it was remarkable. Why Taylor declined to accompany Clough to Leeds has been the subject of much deliberation and, in retirement, Clough himself, as he revealed in Cloughie: Walking on Water – My Life, reflected long and hard upon this, finally concluding that money would have got his ally to Leeds had Manny Cussins dug deep enough. The Brighton chairman Mike Bamber had offered Taylor more money to stay. But there were other reasons, Clough conceded, as well as financial considerations. Clough had helped to get Taylor’s daughter a job on the local newspaper and this added to the happiness of the Taylor family, together in a seaside apartment. Taylor, he mused, had always wanted to be beside the seaside anyway, and he had got his wish. Further, he fancied trying his hand at solo management, and the opportunity had arisen at Brighton.

  ‘I’m staying put,’ was his categorical response when pushed by Clough for a clear reason for his refusal to accompany him to Leeds, even though Clough suspected that Taylor was not as happy in his work as he might have been. Taylor stayed on at Brighton for two more seasons, steering them to a fourth-place finish in the old Division Three in 1975–76, a season in which they were nearly unbeatable at home but couldn’t buy an away win.

  As with the most closely guarded and deeply buried real reasons behind a divorce, or the ending of a friendship, the truth remains hidden from the outside world, but if Clough was confused by Taylor’s unwillingness to up sticks for Yorkshire, then as a Frank Sinatra fan – ‘He met me once’ – he need only have examined the frailties of those inhabiting the world of music for further food for thought. Why fully four decades after their mammoth worldwide hit ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ were members of Procol Harum not speaking to each other and at loggerheads over the royalties? Why did the phenomenally successful Simon and Garfunkel go their own ways so often when the constant worldwide demand was for them to unite on stage, as they did all too infrequently? Why did Scott Walker leave his ‘Brothers’ for a solo career and then disappear into a dark corner for so long?

  Clough and Taylor were two very different individuals, one loud, spontaneous, self-assured and unpredictable, and the other quieter, largely understated, patient and reasoned. It would, and did, take a lot of getting to know each other, and if much of Taylor’s coexistence with Clough was spent in wonder at his eccentricities and foibles, then that would be understandable. Duncan Hamilton, in his award-winning book Provided You Don’t Kiss Me, an account of his relationship with Clough, built up over many years as a sports journalist reporting on Nottingham Forest affairs, recalls:

  On a Friday he [Clough] had a habit of writing out his team sheet to the accompaniment of a Frank Sinatra record. A ‘gramophone player’ (he never referred to a ‘record’ or ‘tape deck’) sat on the low glass-fronted bookcase in his office. A drawing of Sinatra hung on the wall. He would sometimes spend a long time hunting for his reading glasses before beginning the painstaking process of putting down each name in large capital letters.

  ‘You know,’ he said one day, handing me the team sheet, ‘I’d love all of us to play football the way Frank Sinatra sings . . . all that richness in the sound, and every word perfect. How gorgeous would that be?’

  His face glowed like a fire, and he began to sing along with Sinatra, always a word ahead of him, as if he needed to prove that he knew the lyrics.

  ‘I’ve got you . . . under my skin . . .’ He rose from his chair, still singing, and began to pretend he was dancing with his wife. When the song finished, he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. He fell back into his chair, arms and legs splayed. The smile looked as if it might stay on his face for ever. ‘Oh that was good,’ he said. ‘Blow me, if only football could be that much fun . . .’

  Hamilton provides an insight into how kind and loyal Clough could be, traits which go some way to explaining why he and Taylor were able to build up such a long-lasting partnership in the first place:

  On the one hand, Clough was capable of being unforgivably rude, unnecessarily cruel, appallingly bombastic and arrogant, and so downright awkward that I wanted to drop something large and heavy on his big head. On the other hand, he could be extravagantly generous, emollient and warm, ridiculously kind and loyal to whoever he thought warranted it.

  I stammered, sometimes badly. One morning, forcing out a question took me longer than usual.

  ‘Young man,’ he said impatiently. ‘Do you stammer with me, or do you stammer with everyone?’ I told him I always stammered.

  ‘What’s the cure?’ he asked. I said there wasn’t one. He pressed on: ‘When do you stammer the most?’ I said that talking on the phone was always difficult.

  ‘I’ll phone you every day for two weeks,’ he said. ‘We’ll crack this.’

  He almost kept to his word. My stammer didn’t vanish, but it gradually became less severe.

  Hamilton offers a poignant portrait of Clough, showing how isolated the manager could seem after he and Taylor had parted ways for good:

  A few months before his enforced retirement, I found him in his office.

  He had decided not to go to training, he told me. It was an unseasonably mild day for early spring, yet Clough was sitting in his long fleeced coat, zipped up almost to his chin. He was wearing his flat cap and his spectacles sat on the bridge of his nose. A tumbler, half-full with what I presumed was vodka, was at his right hand. His head was bowed over a piece of paper and he was scribbling on it.

  He said he was trying to cheer himself up by writing down the best players who had been at the club since he became manager.

  ‘I’m doing it,’ he said, ‘to remind myself of what life used to be like here, which seems about half a century ago.’

  He reached for his glass and took a long swallow then he vanished for a minute or two and returned with his glass refilled.

  He began to sing, belting out the words to ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. When he reached the line ‘Darling, kiss me’, his head rocked back and he let it hang there, like a decorator examining the ceiling to see if it needed another coat of paint. The glass was still in his hand.

  After a pause he said, ‘Football is a terrible game, you know.’ . . .

  . . . During his last match in charge, Clough stood straight-backed outside the dugout like a captain determined to be on the bridge when the ship went down. After the final whistle, the crowd spilled onto the pitch. In one photograph, Clough, on the verge of tears, appears in the centre of the passionate thousands who were determined not to let him go. Afterwards, he accepted a flower from a young girl, as distraught as a mourner at a funeral. He looked at her, his head on one side, and said tenderly, ‘Hey, beauty, no tears today, please.’

  ‘Can I have a word from you, Brian?’ asked a television interviewer outside the ground. ‘Of course,’ said Clough, walking away. ‘Goodbye.’

  One former Clough player, Peter Shilton, gives an insight into how Clough and Taylor worked together. In his autobiography, he relates:

  As part of our preparations for the European Cup final [in 1980] Clough took us to Spain. We did some light training and played small-sided games, but the football pitch where we were staying was similar to a hard tennis court and no good if I wanted to practise shot-stopping without getting injured.

  I voiced my concerns to Brian and Peter, explaining there simply wasn’t a suitable grassed area on which to practise.

  ‘Well, you haven’t looked hard enough, have you?’ said Clough in that nasal voice of his. ‘Because we know where there is a grassed area that’s perfect for you, Peter me lad.’

  Clough retired to the hotel and I dutifully followed Peter to the outskirts of the small town we were staying in.

  ‘There you go,’ said Peter. ‘There’s your grassed area.’ I couldn’t believe what he was pointing at. Clough and Taylor never believed in pampering their players and I certainly wasn’t an exception. We were standing in front of a traffic roundabout and on it was a circle of grass.
I got the practice essential to my preparation for the European Cup final against a background noise of tooting horns from the passing cars.

  Taylor was certainly privy to many of Clough’s eccentricities and what he thought about them was probably known only to Mrs Taylor. He was well aware of Clough’s capacity to be outlandish, confrontational and provocative, and there remains the unanswered question of how much disquiet and discomfort Taylor foresaw when he turned down the move to Leeds. Taylor might have considered and quickly rejected a scenario in which the new man was going to go into the home of the champions, trash them and all they stood for, attempt to wipe from history the rise and rise under Revie, take the place of his revered predecessor and immediately embark on a demolition and rebuilding job within the playing ranks. Perhaps Taylor just didn’t want to be part of that process, no matter how sincere Clough was in asking him to go with him.

  Certainly, there was not much joy for Clough in football at Leeds without Taylor, but two years later the old partnership was back up and running at Nottingham Forest, one suspects to their mutual relief and pleasure. Yet despite all their achievements, all the accolades that came their way and all the celebrity status they enjoyed through their domestic and European forays, there was to be a final and permanent parting of the ways. A falling-out. This time there was no mystery about the crossing of swords. In May 1983, Taylor, who had quit the game a year previously only to become manager of Derby six months into his retirement, signed the Forest winger John Robertson without letting Clough know about his plans. The two stopped speaking and Robertson’s transfer was contested, with the result that the fee was set by a tribunal. Robertson was injured shortly after he joined Derby and never regained his usual form.