We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  ‘The great thing about Don was his fostering of the family spirit within the club. He was like our second father, and his wife Elsie was like our second mother. The way they looked after us was fantastic. OK, he would use that philosophy to his advantage, with a little bit of conning of us here and there, but in the final analysis that’s what management is about. Every player is different. Some need an arm round them, some need a bollocking, some need dropping from the team, some need sending away for a week’s holiday because they are tired of the game and life itself is getting too much for them. The key with every good manager is to know which individual needs what treatment, and Don was a master at that.

  ‘Where he had been the good shepherd tending his flock, keeping us all close together, his successor was the snarling fox who ripped at our throats. Let me say that it was certainly unknown to me that we had won anything by cheating. Indeed we were the club that suffered most from the very thing of which we stood accused by Clough. We had two European trophies snatched from our grasp at the whim of referees who performed as if they had taken to the field of play in cup finals in a frame of mind that was against us: one against AC Milan in Salonika where even the local Greek people booed the ref and he was later banned for life by UEFA after being convicted of match-fixing, and the other against Bayern Munich in Paris when so many soft decisions went their way and none ours that there were always suspicions, although nothing was proven. So the fact of the matter was that no team had been on the receiving end of cheating more than Leeds, and yet in Clough’s book we were the great perpetrators of misdeeds.

  ‘Clough was a total enigma. Eddie Gray remains one of my best friends, and he tells me of the life his brother Frank had under Clough at Nottingham Forest at a time when they won the European Cup. Eddie will ask Frank what Clough was like and the answer will come, “I don’t know. He’s hard to describe.” Eddie persists and Frank volunteers, “Well, he didn’t do anything tactically. He just used to come into the dressing-room with a ball before a game and say, ‘You see this ball? Well that must be down there on the green part of the stadium. If God had wanted us to play football in the sky he’d have put grass up there.’”

  ‘They’d win a game on a Saturday and he’d tell them to have until Wednesday off duty. Now Frank, who had been at Leeds and who had been used to working hard, would be gearing himself up for a day of torture on the players’ return, and Clough would say, “Right, come on, get your tracksuits on, we’re going to take the dog a walk on the banks of the River Trent.” So they’d walk by the Trent with the boss’s dog for an hour and walk back to the stadium for an hour and then he’d tell them to get off home. Clough did nothing really. He was a most unusual football manager. The afternoon before they played in the European Cup final in Switzerland he led his squad into a bar, produced two crates of beer and ordered the players to get stuck into them. Some of them protested that they didn’t want an alcoholic drink ahead of such a big match, but he insisted they weren’t going to leave until the contents had been consumed. By any stretch of the imagination, that is most unusual.

  ‘Yet you talk to O’Hare and McGovern and others like Kenny Burns who played for him, and they loved him. They had every reason to love him, too, because of what he did for and with them. I have no doubt in my mind that Cloughie was a great manager, because you just do not win league titles with Derby and Nottingham Forest, with two European Cups thrown in, without having a degree of genius. He just was not a great manager of Leeds. On the discipline front, we and the players at nearly every other club were used to strict rules such as the avoidance of alcohol for 48 hours before a match. Suddenly you’ve got a guy saying, “Well, if you want a beer, then have a beer.” In retrospect, who is right? Who is to say who is right and who is wrong?

  ‘Another odd aspect of his management style was that where Don Revie would produce a dossier on every single player that we’d be facing in the next match, going into his abilities at thrown-ins, free kicks and corners, pace, movement, tackling and shooting and so on, Clough would just say, “Go out and do your stuff.” Scientific it was not.

  ‘In the end, I think it must have been a relief to Clough when he and Leeds parted company. It had been a case of him picking a team, us going out there and getting beaten . . . him picking a team, us going out there and getting beaten. And there he was. The biggest certainty was that he was going and, from our perspective, the sooner the better. Europe was on the horizon, and we did not want to have to go into this campaign with disharmony ravaging the club in the way that it was. You can’t keep secrets at a football club, and it soon became known that he had gone up to Gordon McQueen and confided, “Right, we’ll soon be rid of all these old guys and we’ll build the club around you.” That became a joke among the lads. “Ooooh, Gordon,” we’d say, “I’m going to make you a star!”

  ‘Clough tried working on the younger lads, but the fact was Giles went on playing for years, Hunter did, Bremner did. It wasn’t the right time to be sending the club to the breaker’s yard. It was getting near the time, but that was not it. How could it be, when we’d just won the title? Not only were we champions, he started with £2 million in the bank, which was a veritable fortune in those days. The club did not need any major restructure. There was plenty of young talent coming through that could have been blended with the experienced players on the books. For instance, you had McQueen coming in for Charlton, Terry Yorath coming in for Giles or Bremner, Frankie Gray for either of the full-backs. It was all there. A complete package.

  ‘One of the abiding memories I have of Cloughie is the difficulty I and others had in trying to decipher whether he was being serious in some of the things he said or whether, in fact, it was just his humour. A common-sense interpretation would be that many of his rantings were too severe, and delivered without the faintest hint of a smile on his face, to be anything other than sincere. There was neither a joke at the end of it to soften the impact nor a conciliatory “But never mind . . .”

  ‘Training under him often became irksome, too. You’d sit and wait for his arrival and wait and wait and wait. One day, he had his young son Nigel with him and there they were together, like a father plays with his boy, him in goal and Nigel shooting at him. We’d done all the warm-up and were ready for the training session, but he just ignored us as if we were not there for fully ten minutes. I don’t know what point he was trying to make, but I do know that we had gone from such a well-drilled, professional outfit to something of a holiday camp.

  ‘Maybe, though, his style of management was a good one. One accusation that can never be levelled at Clough is that he was not successful. He was, and to some tune. Clough was perhaps even a brilliant manager, albeit only with players he had hand-picked and groomed, those who did what he said and danced to his tune.

  ‘There were no goodbyes at Leeds. On our day off, we saw the pictures in the papers of him leaving in his Mercedes and stories of a pay-off, which he later admitted had set him up for life. This pay-off appeared to be a gesture by the board to get him out of the way as quickly as possible and with a minimum of fuss. It was a brushing under the carpet of a very messy situation created entirely by them.

  ‘Jimmy Armfield was to come in a month later at a time when the lads’ minds were focused on the fact that this would probably be the very last chance for the team that Revie had assembled to win the European Cup. We were in the last-chance saloon, and the most disturbing aspect of the dreadful start to the season was that those dreams of a last hurrah could soon be in tatters. Jimmy’s immediate task was to pick up the pieces after Clough’s short regime. He maintains to this day that he probably had the most difficult job of any manager at Leeds because he was the one who had to tell legends such as Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter and Johnny Giles that they had finished. He calls it his “dirty work”.

  ‘I will never know, I suspect, why Revie left in the first place. Did he leave because he found repellent the prospect of calling time on the careers of b
rilliant players he had nurtured over such a long period? Or did he leave because it was cosy and nice to quit as a manager who had just won the league title and walk straight into the England job? My leaning is towards the former argument. I think he realised that the time was dawning for the mould to be broken and that he simply could not face up to being the one to have to perform that unenviable task. I don’t think the lure of the England job was such that he couldn’t resist it; it was more that he saw it as a convenient way to avoid the inevitable crunch at Elland Road.

  ‘I believe that Don was not built to be an international manager. He loved the day-to-day running of a club, and that was never going to be an aspect of managing the national team, where he would see his players once every three months for a couple of days. Indeed, when I have spoken to the players who played under him for England, they’ve confirmed that they could never get into his ways. His approach, they maintain, was too scientific, too intense for their liking.

  ‘Once Clough was ensconsed at Nottingham Forest, he, of course, became a huge national figure through television. This, unfortunately, was not so much because of his achievements in the game as because he became notorious for coming out with outlandish statements and for his ritual humiliation of the people interviewing him. He almost became a parody of himself, saying controversial things that would leave people observing, “Well, that’s Brian Clough for you.” You could barely believe what you were hearing sometimes, but he got to the stage, I think, where every time he was doing a television interview or a newspaper article, he felt he had to go on the attack. And it didn’t matter who was the victim of his verbal assaults. In this modern climate where people in football are fined for the merest hint of controversy in their behaviour or observations, he would have run out of money pretty damned fast. There was no praise. It was always swingeing criticisms of individuals, the game, the officials, the FA or UEFA or FIFA . . . anybody he had a mind to have a go at.

  ‘There was always the suspicion that drink had taken him over, and in this regard I think the loss of Peter Taylor hit him hard. Peter appeared to be the one man who could sit him down and talk to him and rein in his excesses, but once they had parted company Cloughie seemed to go completely. The word in the game was that drink, unfortunately, was getting the better of him, and, really, he talked himself out of the England job by his constant criticism of the FA. He definitely would have been an England manager had it not been for the fact that the FA chiefs knew they would be unable to handle him.

  ‘He was a character, and there is no denying that he did a fantastic job for both Derby and Forest, especially Forest. Nottingham is a relatively small city, and their achievements under him were out of proportion to a club of Forest’s size. Clough’s name will be forever written into the history of English football. But again, I feel it’s worth pointing out that here in the twenty-first century people still talk about the great Leeds team and the great Liverpool team of the 1960s and ’70s, but you’ll never hear great things said about the Nottingham Forest side. Basically, it was a two-year thing that happened and then it was gone. He achieved great things and then, just as quickly, it disappeared. He turned it into something special and then he turned it into a circus. When the annals of football history are examined, people will say, “Bloody hell, where did Nottingham Forest suddenly come from for those two years?” Anybody who has won a European Cup has got to be rated as a top-ten achiever, but the thing with Clough was that he never built anything that lasted, not like Leeds, Liverpool or Manchester United. He was a quick-fix merchant who built his foundations on sand rather than rock, and the only explanation I can find for that is that if you were one of his players then there would be only a short timespan before you’d become thoroughly disillusioned by his mud-slinging and gratuitous criticism.

  ‘Duncan McKenzie tells a funny story concerning a time he was playing in a practice match. At every twist and turn, Clough was on his case, criticising his passing, ball control, shooting, the lot. Impulsively, Duncan, who’s a very funny guy anyway, stopped the game by picking up the ball and replied to the latest insult, “What do you want for 40 quid a week? Fucking Pelé?” Come to think of it, I wonder what insult Clough might have hurled at Pelé had he been a Leeds player.’

  Eddie Gray observes: ‘If you were able to go back in time and rerun the whole Clough saga, then maybe, given the man’s phenomenal overall record, they should have given him more time. His career record was unbelievable. I have the greatest respect for him as a manager and for what he achieved in the game, but when he came to Leeds everything he did was wrong. If he had his time again, he would, I am sure, go about things more slowly. And perhaps with a little more passion.

  ‘He certainly was not the character at Leeds that he became. Later, I loved listening to him and watching his antics. I mean, when he ran onto the pitch and slapped that young kid round the head. Well! I think he would like to have done that at Leeds with the players, but he would have been told where to go. And he didn’t like that. He was used to bullying people. Once, when he was at Leeds, he phoned for one of the apprentices to take a cup of tea up to his office. When none was forthcoming after 15 minutes, he phoned back and berated the kid on the other end of the phone, demanding: “Who is this?”

  ‘The kid, without giving his name, said, “Who is this?”

  ‘“It’s Brian Clough,” he said. “Who’s this?”

  ‘Silence. Cloughie went mad, demanding to know who had failed the cup-and-saucer test. But he never did find out.

  ‘Clough’s record in the game easily puts him in the top five managers of all time. I can categorically state that on his performance at Leeds he would be in the bottom five managers of all time. What his genius was, I will never know, because I never saw it. And I don’t think anybody really knows what made him such a giant of the game. Was it the fear factor? I doubt it. Strict discipline? He used to take the players for a pint before a game. There would be John Robertson sitting in the dressing-room smoking a fag before a game.

  ‘Being perfectly honest, when I look at that Forest side, a smashing side, I would say that if they hadn’t had a left-winger, they wouldn’t have won anything. If you ask any of those Forest players who was the main man in the side – and Trevor Francis cost a record-breaking £1 million – they would say to a man that it was John Robertson. He was the man who created everything for them, while the rest worked hard. Before every game, Clough’s instruction to all his players was “Just you get the ball and give it to the fat man.” They would do as he said, and eight or ten times in a game Robbo would get the ball into the box across the face of goal in a very dangerous position for the opposition. Great player.

  ‘At Leeds, I cannot think of one single attribute that I saw that would have made him a top manager. But he was. No doubt about it. The funny thing was I never fell out with Cloughie. I saw him when he was on the top table at a dinner in his honour – it was An Evening with Brian Clough or something like that – at Elland Road not long before he died. He was ill at the time and certainly did not look well. I asked him how he was doing and he was great, quite chatty, actually. Most of the other ex-players stayed away, having asked if I was attending, and when I said I was they said, “What would you want to go to that for?”

  ‘“Because,” I told them, “it’s Cloughie – a great manager.”

  ‘And that’s what he was. Whichever way you look at it, he was a bit like George Best: a genius but wayward. I knew George, and his family asked me to speak at his memorial service in Manchester. I spoke along with Sir Alex Ferguson and George’s best mate down the years, the former Manchester United player David Sadler, and there was no doubting the deep affection in which George was held. You can say the same about another individual with alcohol-induced demons, Paul Gascoigne. Paul was meant to be up on the stage at a golf event I attended in North Yorkshire, and because of the state he was in, he had to be ushered off. All three, Brian, George and Paul, have appeared in public in ine
briated states, but perhaps it is better to remember them for their wonderful contributions to our great game than for their flaws.

  ‘In those 44 days, I don’t think any Leeds United player really got to know Cloughie. But I would have loved to have got to know him, mostly to try to understand what made him tick and what made him behave in the way he did. I think the player closest to him was Allan Clarke. He was the one squad member who really appeared to get along with him and maybe the reason for that is that they were both similar characters. I think Clarkey tried to model himself on Cloughie when he became a manager at Barnsley, Leeds, Scunthorpe, Barnsley again and Lincoln. It was an “I’m the boss and don’t you forget it” style.

  ‘When Jimmy Armfield came in, he immediately showed some respect to the players. Where with Clough we couldn’t win an argument, let alone a match, on the field, with Jimmy in charge, the same bunch of players got to the European Cup final. Enough said.

  ‘I’m sure that if I sat next to Brian now and told him that at Leeds he got it wrong, the response I would get would be an unreserved agreement. With Brian, it all came down to one thing – his dislike of Don. When he first came, the first thing he did was to sling out the office furniture that had been Don’s – the desk, the chair, the settee, the lot. Don had just taken delivery of a new Mercedes as his club car, and Cloughie wouldn’t have it because it had been Don’s. I think this dislike was mutual, by the way.’

  Having witnessed one of his managers go on to take charge of England, Gray is adamant that, in Clough, there should have been a second. ‘His record insists that he should have been England manager,’ Gray says, ‘but the FA were frightened of him. No disrespect to Nottingham Forest as a football club, but for Clough to have won two European Cups for them makes him a breed apart. Yes, he should have managed England. Of that I have no doubt.’

  Gordon McQueen concludes: ‘Cloughie rests peacefully in the knowledge that what he achieved with Derby and particularly Nottingham Forest will never be repeated – small-city, provincial clubs winning league titles and conquering Europe. But at Leeds, he was a man in too much of a hurry. The directors knew within a week of appointing Clough that they had made a mistake and very quickly regretted their actions.’