by Phil Rostron
If Brian were alive today, he’d reveal parental protectiveness for Nigel all over again, but only because of the high expectations others are already placing on him. He’d be confident his boy could handle it. I once made the mistake of casually asking Brian: ‘When did you realise that Nigel had talent?’ He dropped his chin to his chest and gave me a hard stare, as if peering over a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He wagged his finger in rebuke. ‘As soon as he was born, of course,’ he said sharply. ‘He’s my son – he was bound to have talent.’
There was a touch of magic about Clough Jr’s introduction to the Derby crowd. It came just before the kick-off in a Carling Cup semi-final first leg against the mighty Manchester United, with the new manager not officially due to start his job until the next day. The reception he received was predictably warm and enthusiastic, with the added excitement of Derby all set to make their first appearance in a major cup semi-final since 1976 and their first in the last four of the League Cup since 1968. The script was written and Kris Commons’ goal on the half-hour was enough for a dominant Derby to take a one-goal lead to Old Trafford for the return leg, but a spirited performance there saw them lose 4–3 on aggregate.
Then, as if some magical, mystical fixture fixer were at work, their visitors in the FA Cup fourth round just three nights later were local rivals and bitter enemies Nottingham Forest. Sometimes you just couldn’t make it up. A 1–1 draw meant a further meeting with the old foe, and a City Ground humdinger ensued, Derby coming back from 2–0 down at half-time to win 3–2.
The home crowd that had once adored Nigel Clough as a player and his father as a manager booed him as he sprinted for the sanctuary of the dressing-room at the final whistle, and the man who spoiled the party left the media matters to right-hand man Gary Crosby, who explained: ‘Nigel does not look for glory. He is very pleased with the victory, but nothing more than that. He does not want to be seen to be taking any personal glory from it. It is just fantastic to win a cup tie after being 2–0 down.’
It was the first victory Derby had tasted at Forest since they were managed by a certain Clough Sr back in 1971. Soon afterwards, Derby were to fulfil an FA Cup fifth-round tie against Manchester United, meaning that in his first two months in charge Clough had faced the European champions three times and his old club Nottingham Forest twice. All this after Derby had beaten in the FA Cup third round Forest Green, whose name, ever so slightly spookily, makes one think of Brian Clough’s trademark squash jersey.
There were good signs in the league for Clough Jr. A 3–0 victory over Plymouth – Derby’s third win in eight days – provided the club’s biggest away victory for seven years, and daylight was opening between themselves and the Coca-Cola Championship relegation zone. Clough observed:
Apart from the QPR game, we have been able to take positives from all our performances so far. But there is still a long way to go, I have got to keep stressing that. There are three months of the season left and we are only five points above the bottom three, so we will need a lot more performances like the one at Plymouth. But we feel that the players are stepping up to the plate at the moment and doing their jobs extremely well, and there is a good spirit there. It’s been a rough 18 months for the club and we won’t come out of it in a month, but there are signs that we can come out of it.
Understated. Reserved. Cautious. Hardly a chip off the old block.
Over at Leeds United, their demise as a once-great club is probably the most marked. Their decline set in after the European Cup final defeat in 1975, and all forms of success eluded them until they won the Second Division under Howard Wilkinson in 1989–90. A brief and spectacular revival saw them finish fourth in the top flight at the first time of asking, and they improved upon this by surprisingly winning the championship the following season, the last before the advent of the Premier League and the last time an English manager won his country’s highest division.
But it was all downhill from there, and Wilkinson never recovered from overseeing a wretched display by Leeds against Aston Villa in the 1996 League Cup final. A 4–0 home defeat by Manchester United early in the 1996–97 season saw him walking the gangplank to be replaced by George Graham. Leeds’ qualification for the UEFA Cup for the 1998–99 season sparked a brief revival in fortunes. European football was on the Elland Road agenda for five successive seasons, and it was looking like the good old days were back under the management of David O’Leary, who had been Graham’s assistant until the Scot walked out in favour of Tottenham Hotspur. In 1999–2000, Leeds battled to the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup – their first semis in Europe in 25 years – only to fall to Turkish outfit Galatasaray.
The next season was one of which Clough would have been proud, with Leeds making the last four in the Champions League courtesy of thrilling victories over Lazio, Anderlecht and Deportivo. A goalless draw at home to Valencia in the first leg offered hope, but a comprehensive 3–0 defeat in the return in Spain shattered their dreams. Then . . . the plunge. A tame exit from the UEFA Cup at the hands of PSV Eindhoven in 2001–02 was bad enough, but this was followed by a similar surrender against Malaga the following season, which wiped Europe off the Leeds radar, possibly for years to come.
Once they were in the Champions League, heavy spending on players was undertaken to try to ensure that Leeds would be a permanent fixture in Europe’s biggest club competition, but it was a gamble that backfired spectacularly. They failed to qualify, debts began to mount, two of their biggest players, Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer, were involved in a high-profile court case, the relationship between O’Leary and chairman Peter Ridsdale deteriorated, and soon Leeds were on a collision course with disaster.
O’Leary was dismissed and replaced by former England supremo Terry Venables, whose unhappy time at the club hit its low point when Woodgate was sold to Newcastle for £9 million against his manager’s wishes. Venables’ tenure was to last a mere eight months before he was sacked and replaced by Peter Reid, who was inheriting a rapidly deteriorating side but nevertheless engineered an escape from relegation, which had been looking more and more likely.
Ridsdale, meanwhile, had resigned from the Leeds board to be replaced by Professor John McKenzie, a local economics expert who was to preside over the dismissal of Reid following a shaky start to the 2003–04 season that saw crushing defeats by Leicester, Everton, Arsenal and Portsmouth. A once-steady ship was now rocking, and there were further significant developments when Gerald Krasner, an insolvency expert heading up a consortium, took the helm as chairman. He presided over a fire sale of the club’s assets while caretaker manager Eddie Gray battled valiantly to produce the goods on the field, only for the club to be relegated after 14 years among the elite.
The drop cost Gray his job and Kevin Blackwell, who had been recruited by Reid as his number two, was handed his first managerial role. Despite the ongoing sale of players, with eyes constantly on the wage bill, Blackwell played the incoming transfer market shrewdly and settled the team to attain mid-table safety in 2004–05.
In January 2005, a takeover of the club was completed by former Chelsea chairman Ken Bates, who said:
I’m delighted to be stepping up to the mantle at such a fantastic football club. I see Leeds as a great club that has fallen on hard times. We have a lot of hard work ahead to get the club back where it belongs in the Premiership, and with the help of our fans we will do everything we can. It’s going to be a tough job and the first task is to stabilise the cash flow and sort out the remaining creditors. But there is light at the end of a very long tunnel. For the past year it has been a matter of firefighting – now we can start running the club again.
Krasner gave his view on the takeover:
This deal ensures the medium- to long-term survival of the club, and I believe Mr Bates’ proposals are totally for the benefit of the club. We are content that under Mr Bates Leeds United will continue to consolidate and move forward. When we took over Leeds United in March 2004, the club had a debt
of £103 million. Since that date, my board has succeeded in reducing the debt to under £25 million. We worked tirelessly to solve all of the problems at Leeds United. Eighty per cent of the problems have already been overcome, and we came to this agreement with Mr Bates to secure its ongoing success.
Blackwell was given some financial clout in the summer of 2005 and brought in recognised strikers Rob Hulse, Richard Cresswell and Robbie Blake, as well as gifted USA winger Eddie Lewis. A top-six finish was achieved and after they saw off Preston North End in a fiery double-header in the play-off semi-finals, they were presented with the task of overcoming Watford in the final. But they had one of those days, lost comprehensively and were resigned to another season of trying to bring back the glory days.
A poor start to the following season saw Blackwell replaced by Dennis Wise, whom Bates had known from their days together at Chelsea, but he was always fighting an uphill battle. At the beginning of May 2007, with relegation looking certain, the club was declared insolvent and went into administration. As a result, Leeds were docked ten points by the Football League, sending the club into the third tier of English football for the first time in its history.
After a stormy few weeks during which United’s survival at times looked uncertain, the administrators, KPMG, announced that the club had been sold to a consortium led by Ken Bates. Leeds were back under Bates’ wing, and he was putting a positive spin on matters, commenting, ‘Now we’ve got a clean start and a clean sheet of paper.’ However, the club’s troubles were far from over. At the beginning of August, Leeds were hit with a 15-point deduction because the club had been unable to meet the terms of the League’s policy on insolvency.
Despite this penalty, and a mid-season change of manager when Wise controversially left to join Kevin Keegan at Newcastle United, being replaced by former Elland Road crowd favourite Gary McAllister, Leeds went on to secure a play-off place with one game to spare, only to lose 1–0 to Doncaster Rovers in the final at the new Wembley Stadium. McAllister’s reign was short-lived, however, and he was sacked in December 2008 after a bad run that included the first loss to a non-league side in Leeds’ history when they were beaten by Histon in the early stages of the FA Cup.
His replacement was Simon Grayson, a former player on Leeds’ books who was then managing Blackpool. Again, a play-off spot was in the bag, but in May 2009 Millwall curtailed their ambitions in the semi-finals. For Leeds, it is proving a long way back.
The three clubs most famously managed by Clough do have something in common, although each for different reasons: all three marauded through the playing fields of Europe during the ’70s and all, within a comparatively short time after Clough’s departure, flirted with the ignominy of plying their trade in the third tier, with a return to European competition a dim and distant prospect. If Clough were to return from that great football stadium in the sky for a brief look at how his old clubs were faring five years after his death, his observations on Championship strugglers Nottingham Forest and Derby County might be, ‘Get your bloody fingers out.’ And on Coca-Cola League One club Leeds United, ‘I told you so.’
17
PURE GENIUS
Who thought Derby County could be turned into League champions; that any manager could bounce back from getting the bullet after 44 days with a great club and go on to prove himself among the best managers of all time; that what was done at Derby could be repeated at Forest; that after winning one European Cup, we could retain it; that a brash, self-opinionated young footballer, cut down by injury in his prime, would go on to achieve more impressive fame as a brash, highly successful manager?
Brian Clough, Cloughie: Walking on Water
Brian Clough is arguably the greatest manager the English game has known. Wherever and whenever the debate is sparked about who was better than whom, and why, it is impossible to keep Clough’s name out of the argument.
Peter Hampton says: ‘From Clough’s own point of view, of course, his short stay at Leeds was fortuitous for his career path, and easy money came his way with his severance making him financially secure for life. Further, after his departure from the club, he went on to be a hugely successful manager with Nottingham Forest, and what he achieved there can never be taken away from him. It was fantastic.
‘I did feel, under Clough at Leeds, that the bunch of youngsters of which I was a part would have been given a chance by him. You got the notion that the kids would be nurtured by him because this was a time when the squad was ageing and, in all honesty, was ready for being broken up. Already there were changing faces, and those he brought in, O’Hare, McGovern and McKenzie, could have been mixed with the youngsters to form a much-changed Leeds United. I played with this trio in the reserves and each of them expressed a love for Cloughie, with two of them having been with him at Derby County.
‘I often wonder what might have become of my own career had Clough stayed in situ at Leeds. I got the feeling that he rated me as a player, purely because if he didn’t rate you, you were gone. I stayed. He wasn’t one of those managers who would summon you to his office for a private chat to let you know what he thought about you; it was more that his actions spoke louder than words, and some were there one minute and gone the next. You could tell who he liked and disliked. In training, he would simply tell anybody he didn’t like, “And you, young man, you can just bugger off. You’re not wanted round here,” whereas he’d leave alone those he wanted on board. He never said a bad word to me or, as far as I know, about me, and he was playing me regularly in the reserves, to the extent that I thought I was doing OK and would soon get a first-team opportunity.
‘About the worst I ever got from him was one day when he looked me in the eye and said, “Young man, you’re standing around like a spare prick at a wedding.” This was in the dressing-room after the first of the pre-season games in 1974–75, an away fixture at Huddersfield, when I had been given a squad number and figured in the travelling party. I didn’t make the team, however, and when he gave some of the big-name players a bollocking at half-time, I was pleased just to have been left well alone. After the game, however, Clough turned to me, the spare prick, and said, “Go and get some beers for these players.” You don’t know why he’s singled you out for such a menial task. Perhaps it was a test of character; maybe he wanted to see how I would react. As a young lad, you’ve got two choices. You either break down and cry or you bat it back. All I know is that I did as I was told. Remember, this was the man who told one international footballer, “If you’d been a horse they’d have put you down long ago,” and another world-famous player, “All you do is cheat and try to get the opposition into trouble,” and a full title-winning squad, “You can all throw your medals in the bin because they were not won fairly.”
‘The day he was fired, I remember thinking, “Oh, crikey, here we go again. Now there’ll be another manager to try to impress. Maybe the new guy will want me out.” All sorts of things run through your mind.
‘I followed Cloughie’s career closely once he had left Leeds for Nottingham Forest. I think the whole country did. I played against his Forest side for Leeds in the semi-final of the League Cup in 1977–78. We’d lost the first leg 3–1 and in the second leg at Forest we went a goal up before again going down 4–2. Losing 7–3 on aggregate was a humbling experience! So I had first-hand experience of the team he built, and you’ve got to take off your hat to him for putting together such a dynamic squad. He had some terrific players and none better than his left-winger John Robertson. He was supremely talented, and they would get the ball to him as much as they could. I recall marking their right-winger Martin O’Neill and at times in the game he would be stood motionless. “Am I bloody invisible?” he joked a couple of times, his frustration at not getting the ball becoming more and more evident. He had been told to just stick out there on the right, hugging the touchline to try to stretch the defence, but I certainly cannot imagine Martin these days issuing instructions to his players to channel everything t
hrough just one individual.’
Hampton is best remembered by Leeds fans for making a substitute appearance during the 1975–76 season in a match against Burnley at Elland Road and hitting a spectacular winning goal. He remembers: ‘Terry Yorath was booed by a section of the crowd in the first half, and they continued to give him a bad time until Jimmy Armfield took him off and put me on. Taffy waved two fingers at his tormentors on his way down the tunnel, and it was shortly after that that he was transferred to Tottenham. It just shows how one man’s misfortune is another’s opportunity. Where Terry had got himself into the supporters’ bad books, that goal made me something of a folk hero for a time! Such is the uncertainty of this wonderful world we call football.’
Peter Lorimer concludes: ‘Three decades on, we, as ex-players, all get on as old buddies. We meet regularly and love each other’s company, and we still back the club to the hilt. Every home game, five or six lads go down and do the match-day hospitality, and we all want the club to succeed. We feel we gave the club its reputation. It lost it and we feel we want it back. And that’s for everybody – the city and the fans.
‘I doubt that Clough could ever have built that at Leeds. Again, when you talk to people who have played for him, you learn that there were little cliques here and there and a body of people in which this person didn’t get on with that one and this little bunch didn’t gel with that little crowd. We never had that at Leeds. We all got on with each other. Sure, there would be the odd little fallout in training and even during a match where there would be a verbal altercation. But this was never because you didn’t like the person you were having a go at; it was heat-of-the-moment stuff that stayed in the moment and was forgotten about afterwards. In the showers later, you’d hear people saying, “Did you hear those two at it with handbags?” They’d make a joke of it. And this was all nurtured by Don Revie.