We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  Clough and Taylor never spoke again, although when Taylor died in October 1990, Clough and his family did attend the funeral. It is said that when Ronnie Fenton, the assistant coach at Forest, phoned Clough to inform him of Taylor’s death, the manager hung up and began to cry uncontrollably. After Taylor’s death, Clough paid public tribute to him several times, dedicating his autobiography to him, speaking warmly of him when he was given the freedom of Nottingham and acknowledging Taylor’s part in his successes at the unveiling of a bust of himself at the City Ground.

  Football, like music, and probably because of their fame-and ego-driven cultures, has featured many high-profile bust-ups down the years. Saying goodbye to people you’ve worked closely with – or sometimes taking separate paths without even saying goodbye – is part and parcel of the game, but some splits, particularly between a manager and his players, are more acrimonious than others. Sir Alex Ferguson has had his share of ‘good riddance’ moments with the likes of Jaap Stam and David Beckham; Newcastle has witnessed fall-outs between Ruud Gullit and Alan Shearer and between Joe Kinnear and Charles N’Zogbia; John Toshack clashed with Davor Suker at Real Madrid; and at Liverpool, Gérard Houllier didn’t see eye to eye with Robbie Fowler.

  Splits between managers and their assistants are much less common and are usually driven by the ambition of number twos who, seeing their way to the top at their current club blocked, will seek a prime job elsewhere or be enticed into one.

  Had he been able to dictate the course of events, Clough would always have been more comfortable with Taylor at his side. In Walking on Water, he says:

  A manager needs an assistant, a number two, a right-hand man, you name it. He needs a prop, a support, somebody to lean on in times of uncertainty and doubt, who will also be a sounding board, a source of reassurance or correction. Believe it or not there were times when I needed to be put right. A manager needs a friend and that doesn’t mean a yes-man. Peter Taylor provided the best possible combination of qualities, especially for me, such a big-headed sod from the time I scored my first goal. To be able to work with such a friend was ideal.

  That shows a vulnerability and a softer side to Clough’s nature that those witnessing his high-profile actions from afar would be unaware of. A popular view would be that he came across as an individual who didn’t need help, that he was an ultra-confident, self-assured individual, comfortable acting solus. Certainly, he appears to have presented himself in this way at Leeds, giving rise to suspicions that his brashness was merely a cover for the insecurity he felt in his new surroundings without the support, advice and friendship of his staunch ally.

  In April 2009, Taylor’s daughter Wendy Dickinson gave an interview to BBC Radio Nottingham’s John Holmes in which she said that she went to every game of Forest’s European Cup campaigns and described the time as ‘magical’. She said her dad was constantly being mobbed in the street by fans. However, Wendy argued that Clough’s and Taylor’s roles were not as clear-cut as some journalists and historians have made out:

  Dad was much more than a talent scout, Brian was much more than the motivator. I don’t think it was a question of Dad being the good guy and Brian being the bad guy. As Martin O’Neill says, you could get a pasting from Peter and Brian would be the one to put his arm around you.

  She added:

  I love my dad. He was a great man. I’m not silly enough to believe he got everything right. Signing John Robertson without telling Brian was probably not the greatest decision of his life.

  Wendy said she was thrilled when she heard Timothy Spall was playing her father in The Damned United, but felt the film didn’t get him quite right:

  Timothy Spall is a bit short, a bit rotund and played my dad with a Brummie accent which I did find a bit strange. I think they made my father too nice and they portrayed Brian as a bit of an arrogant, over-emotional nutter! Both men were far more complex than they were portrayed on screen.

  Clough once said: ‘I’m not equipped to manage successfully without Peter Taylor. I am the shop window and he is the goods.’ He was never as successful a manager without his friend, and the overwhelming majority view is that had they paired up at Leeds, the paths taken by the Elland Road club and Nottingham Forest – one on the decline, the other rising meteorically – might have been very different.

  13

  DO AS I SAY

  When I go, God’s going to have to give up his favourite chair.

  Brian Clough

  There were some compulsive double acts in the 1970s, like Morecambe and Wise, Cannon and Ball, and Newman and Redford. Then there was Clough and Newbon. Gary Newbon, who began his career as a sports reporter for the Midlands-based ATV Today programme in the early 1970s, was to make his name as a roving reporter for ITV Sport, often obtaining match reactions from players and managers in the tunnels during European Cup games. He grew up in Bury St Edmunds, attending the same school in the same year as his BBC football broadcasting counterpart John Motson. Today, he works for Sky Sports. He struck up a great rapport with the unpredictable Clough, and their on-air jousting became unmissable. Newbon came to know Clough well and has much to say about Clough’s time at Leeds and his subsequent success at Nottingham Forest:

  ‘In my 40 years in television, I have interviewed many international sporting greats. There was Muhammad Ali, as well as several other leading boxers of their time, such as Ken Norton, Chris Eubank and George Foreman. There have been Olympic gold medallists too numerous to mention, and from the world of football there was, most memorably, Pelé (six or seven times), Franz Beckenbauer, Jürgen Klinsmann, Sir Alex Ferguson and Brian Clough. I’ve interviewed thousands of sportspeople, but if I had to make a list of my favourites through the decades, the top three, in descending order, would be Clough, Ferguson and Eubank. Clough is my number one for many reasons, one of them being the mutual affection built over a long period of time.

  ‘My professional relationship with Clough was built on such a sound footing that, win, lose or draw, he would come out of the dressing-room and do an interview if he had promised to do so beforehand. He always kept his word, but there were a few anxious moments one evening in April 1990 when, in the middle of a dreadful run in the old First Division, Forest went to Everton and lost 4–0. What was significant about this was that they were only a week or two away from a big date in the League Cup final against Oldham at Wembley, and at Goodison, Forest were frankly awful. Understandably, perhaps, Clough spent longer in the dressing-room than usual, in all probability giving a few character readings to his hapless players, and my producer Trevor East, with, as always, a professional eye to the schedules, began to panic that we would not get our Clough interview in time. I kept reassuring Trevor that Cloughie wouldn’t let us down, that he would emerge any minute, and there was a collective sigh of relief when he duly did. He was, as usual, worth the wait.’

  As Newbon suggests, Clough’s TV appearances were usually good value. In the ’70s, The Morecambe and Wise Show, with its mixture of slapstick and wordplay, would be followed on the BBC by Match of the Day, and you hoped against hope that the programme would feature among the thrills and spills of goals and near misses an interview with Brian Clough – with his own brand of slapstick and wordplay. Television seemed to bring Clough even more vividly to life. Whatever you thought of him, whether you loved or loathed him, you certainly could not ignore him.

  One interview with Newbon was a case in point. Clough ended it by planting a great big kiss on the presenter’s mouth. Of that memorable occasion, Newbon says: ‘You always had to bear it in mind with Cloughie that chaos might ensue when he was at the microphone, and there were ominous signs when he began the interview by saying that the only person certain of his place on the team coach to Wembley was Albert. Cue horror moment. I could not for the life of me think of any Forest player called Albert and therefore to whom he might be referring. “And he’s the fella who drives the coach,” Clough said helpfully as I scratched around for a sensib
le next line. Then, some slapstick. “They weren’t competitive at all tonight,” he started. “They didn’t want to know.” By now, we were running over by a few seconds, and I was just getting instructions from the studio to wrap it up when Clough went on, “My lot are just a bunch of pansies!” and proceeded to plant upon me a huge kiss. As an interview, it was all over the place but it served to illustrate that with Clough if you expected the unexpected, then you wouldn’t go far wrong. On this occasion, Fleet Street’s finest all called to pose the question of whether he was under the influence of drink, but I didn’t want to get involved in that debate and I don’t think he was in any case.

  ‘In 2002, I suffered a stroke and it was thought I would have to undergo a triple heart bypass operation. That wasn’t the case and I’m fine now, but I remember the first card I received was from Cloughie. It read, “Get well soon. Behave yourself!” It was a very harrowing time for me and my family, and people were very caring. It was thanks to my specialist Adrian McMillan that I survived this health scare. Anybody who has been there will know it is an emotional time. You start contemplating your own mortality and suchlike, and I was reduced to tears when Cloughie’s family let it be known that he was very fond of me and really cared about my well-being.

  ‘I thought then about how Cloughie had made Trevor Francis, a lad I had known since he was 15, Britain’s first million-pound footballer and how I had done the first interview with the new superstar. I don’t know who was the more nervous, Trevor or me, but we have been great mates ever since.

  ‘Back in the 1970s, I initiated an annual Midlands soccer writers’ awards bash, which we held in the old Crossroads studio at ATV in Birmingham. I recall a young Jasper Carrott hosting the first one, and it was always a great evening. On one occasion, Cloughie announced Trevor, then with Birmingham City, as the Young Player of the Year and insisted, after telling him, “You are a very talented young man,” that he would gladly hand over the trophy if only the youngster would take his hands out of his pockets to receive it! Old Willie Bell, the Birmingham manager, was distinctly unamused by Clough’s embarrassing the teenager, and I really thought he was going to hit him! Cloughie didn’t mean any harm by it, though. He was a great bloke whose instinct was to look out for youngsters.

  ‘After his liver transplant, I rang to say that I would dearly like to take him and his wife Barbara out to lunch on a hot summer’s day to one of his favourite places, the Dovecliff Hall Hotel near Burton upon Trent. There was only one other couple there, and in these quiet surroundings we talked for hours. Brian was by then off the booze completely. It was a quality day and one that I greatly treasure because it was not long after this that he died.

  ‘Cloughie had once been kind to my father, who had been an RAF pilot during the war and died at the age of 62. Derby County embarked on their European campaign in the 1972–73 season, and I was part of the ITV team covering this. My father rarely attended football matches, but he agreed to come along to one of these big games, and I took the opportunity before the match to introduce him to Cloughie. As usual, I had the manager lined up for a post-match interview, but when he emerged from the dressing-room he took one look at me and said, “Never mind you, it’s your father I’m after.” He escorted Dad into the inner sanctum of the home dressing-room, where he introduced him to all the players, and it was some considerable time before they re-emerged. “I like your father better than I like you,” he said to me after I’d waited with ever-decreasing patience for the interview I had gone along for to be given the green light. This, though, illustrated the brilliant style of Clough at a time when most other managers on the scene would never have thought to do something like that.

  ‘One thing that Clough insisted upon throughout his career was that he would say nothing off the record. “If I let a cat out of the bag, or reveal a secret, you’ll use it in 10 or 15 years’ time,” was his argument.

  ‘He was a very careful man in some ways, but Clough made three big mistakes in his career. Top of that list was going to Leeds, second was resigning at Derby, where he got involved in plot, sub-plot, counter-plot and double plot, and third was falling out with Peter Taylor. Football, too, made mistakes with Clough, not least the Football Association’s failure to appoint him as England manager. You look at the great long list of failures since 1966 when we won the World Cup and can only conclude that, with a string of errors such as overlooking Clough, England gets what it deserves sometimes. It is difficult to argue with the Leeds board when they concluded, after Don Revie’s departure, that Brian Clough was the right man for the job. They would have taken note of the fact that he had so recently won a league title with unfashionable Derby and gone on to take them all the way to a European Cup final and deduced that if he could do that with Derby, then what he could do with Leeds would be unlimited.

  ‘Becoming involved with Leeds United rebounded on him mainly because of the slatings he gave them while he was with Derby County. The Leeds side he inherited had a reputation for being a bit dirty and a bit sly, and these were traits that went against the grain with Clough. So some of the difficulties he had at Leeds were down to a failure to have recognised earlier in life that if you are going to slag people off, then you should be extremely careful, because you just never know where and when they are going to turn up in the future. It’s a good bet that those about whom you have been most critical, or those whom you’ve neglected, will eventually come back onto the radar.

  ‘There’s good value in understanding this. When Dave Mackay was managing Derby County, no one in the media would ever talk to the youth-team manager of the day, probably because of a misguided notion that he was insignificant and didn’t warrant the time or the effort. But I did and I gave him my telephone numbers, and one day the phone rang and the voice at the other end said that I should prepare for an exclusive interview. The caller would meet me at the studio at five o’clock. All kinds of technical set-ups have to be put in place for such events, and they have to be judged on priority and news value and so on. But when I was asked about the strength of the proposed interview, I was unable to say. I didn’t know what it was about and the only information I was able to divulge was that it concerned somebody who at the time was anything but a household name. You can imagine, then, the reluctance to shuffle schedules to accommodate an unknown quantity, but in the end we got our exclusive – that youth-team manager Colin Murphy had taken over from Dave Mackay as Derby manager – and we got the exclusive first interview, which would have been coveted by all the other outlets and might indeed have been theirs had they shown more interest in Colin in the first place.

  ‘Where Sir Alex Ferguson is out on his own as the most successful English club manager in my lifetime, with a simply stunning record, and Bob Paisley was something of an unsung hero at Liverpool, who are more readily associated with success under Bill Shankly, Brian Clough was truly a legend. The success he achieved was with two smaller clubs, in Derby County and Nottingham Forest. I disagree with those who argue that they are in fact big clubs because they are capable of attracting crowds of 30,000 plus. In the Midlands, only Aston Villa and, to a lesser extent, Wolves are big clubs in the sense of their history, tradition and ongoing potential to be real forces in the game. The detractors’ argument slightly annoys me, because it belittles what Clough did and has no basis in fact.

  ‘With Clough and Leeds, probably the best illustration of where things went wrong comes from Manchester United, where the board were once under big pressure to relieve Fergie of his duties but held their nerve and duly got their reward. Had the Leeds board been more stoical about the dip in form and less hasty to judge, who knows where it might have taken them as a club?

  ‘More than the events in house after he took up the post, though, it was the build-up to his appointment that made it unlikely ever to work. That said, it wasn’t a bad bit of business from Cloughie’s point of view – a decent salary and a £90,000 pay-off for 44 days’ endeavour made it worth his while. Ye
t if only he had stayed, I have good reason to believe that he would have been joined sooner rather than later at Elland Road by his ally, friend and mentor Peter Taylor. I am sure that eventually he would have been unable to resist the lure of the bigger fish to fry up north alongside his buddy. They were a great double act in that Taylor was an excellent judge of a player and Clough was unafraid to go out and buy the very best of them, no matter what it took.

  ‘Clough despised agents, by the way, and their role and influence in the modern-day game would not have sat well with him. He would, however, have adapted, and few agents would have got the better of him. He had a fantastic mind, with a brain that was tuned to thinking at 100 mph. He knew players and he knew football. Leeds had great players then, with the likes of Giles, Bremner, Cooper, Madeley, Clarke and Jones particularly outstanding. In hindsight, the Clough thing was never going to work. With established players like that, there was the probability that there would be unease between them and a new manager, resulting in a power struggle, and that the chairman would buckle under the pressure of that state of affairs.

  ‘The trouble with chairmen down the years is that they have demanded success not over a reasonable period of time but instantly, and many managers have paid the price because they have, understandably, been unable to deliver in an unreasonably short time. If you were to nominate a model chairman of modern times, it would have to be Steve Gibson at Middlesbrough, whose patience, understanding, loyalty and commitment have been simply sensational. David Moyes has kept Everton afloat with the backing of a strong chairman. But then you consider the likes of Tottenham and Newcastle, with their constant wholesale changes, you look at where they are now, Premier League also-rans at best, and you deduce that there is nothing in football quite like stability.’