Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough

In each decade Clough significantly promoted football through the strength of his personality; as a character instantly recognisable to those who didn’t habitually watch the game. He was a guest on Parkinson. Mike Yarwood impersonated him with a jabbing finger and a ‘now young man, listen to me’ routine, which Clough found immensely flattering. ‘True fame is when the newspapers spell your name right in Karachi – and ordinary fame is when Yarwood does you,’ he once told me. ‘Yarwood did me a favour. He made me popular. He advanced my cause.’

Clough was so skilled at self-promotion that I felt he didn’t need anyone to beat a drum on his behalf. TV and newspapers adored him because you seldom had to look underneath his words to find the hidden meaning (though the motive was often of labyrinthine complexity). Each sentence was plain and pointed, like a spear. He didn’t rely on qualifying terms such as ‘perhaps’ or ‘might’ or ‘maybe’. He didn’t dissolve into banality. He hated yawning politeness, and didn’t mind being portrayed as a snarling malcontent.

A sport’s back-page lead, aimed primarily at a popular audience, is necessarily limited in scope. My own pieces tended for obvious reasons to be variations on a single theme: Clough’s opinions. He sold newspapers. I would sit at the keyboard and write: ‘Brian Clough today …’ and then press on with the guts of the story.

Every day on the back of the Nottingham Evening Post, Clough ‘demanded’ or ‘insisted’ or ‘attacked’ or ‘appealed’ or (less often) ‘made a plea’ or ‘sent a message’ to someone or other. The quotes justifying the first paragraph began to run from the third. The rest was as straightforward as joining the dots in a child’s puzzle book. The basic principle was to make sure his name appeared in the intro because, as Hollywood says, the lead always gets the close-up.

Good quotes are the diamonds of popular journalism, and Clough represented the richest and the deepest seam. He was an inexhaustible mine of one-liners. He took pride in being an agitator, and gratuitously provocative. He didn’t care – at least not very much – about the way he was perceived, whether or not anyone liked him or how his opinions would play politically, except, naturally, when it suited his own agenda. It meant that enemies gathered in battalions, a fact Clough acknowledged sanguinely.

‘That bunch of shithouses at the Football Association – who know nowt – want me to shut up,’ he said from behind his cluttered desk, showing me a letter with the FA’s embossed shield on it. The FA had written to admonish him for a comment he had made about wanting to ‘kick’ one of his own players. ‘Let’s you and me write a piece and tell them to fuck off – in the nicest possible way. You’ll pick the right words … Make it up for me.’ He trusted you to do your job the way he trusted a player on a Saturday afternoon. If you didn’t shape up … well, a bollocking followed.

Stories about his epic drinking, the rages like forked lightning, and the ‘bungs’ are draped like a black cape across the sad last acts of his career. But a man’s life has to be seen in the full to appreciate it. He shouldn’t be judged on the last flickerings of the candle. The good years were pure gravy for Clough, filled with silverware and respect, and not purely because his name was there in the record books as having won the League Championship and European Cup twice apiece. His legacy went beyond the business of winning trophies.

When Clough became a manager at Hartlepool in 1965, aged only thirty, his contemporaries were predominantly conventional figures with a 1940s or 1950s ideology. Most were middleaged or approaching it and maintained a staid, regulation collar-and-tie approach to football. Clough was iconoclastic. Very early on he recognised the value of publicity and how to make it work for him. He had the loudest voice, the magnetic pull of the fairground barker and an understanding of how the mechanics of the media functioned. He knew how to exploit it for himself.

As a player at Middlesbrough, Clough had deliberately leaked his dissatisfaction with the club’s attitude towards him so that he could gain the upper hand in the struggle to either force a transfer or improve his salary. He was eventually sold. As a manager, with Peter Taylor, he had the prescience to realise that two men, personally compatible but with contrasting talents, could do the manager’s job better than one. He pioneered the idea of a short break mid-season for the team, and proved himself innovative in his handling of players and in his approach to coaching.

Clough was also lucky. His break into management came at the time when television began to embrace football more firmly, chiefly because of England’s World Cup win in 1966. He eventually became emblematic of the period when managers began to dominate the headlines as much as, if not more than, players – and he was one of the main reasons why the cult of the manager developed in the way it did. Clough made sure that he – not the players, and certainly not the chairman who bankrolled it – was the axis on which the club always turned. Open dissent against someone or something, or merely going against the grain, pushed him to centre stage. The strategy of yelling his contempt and kicking up dust whenever he could for the sake of it proved profitable. Clough soon became more important than whichever team he managed, and then more important than the club itself. Profile was everything to him because it was accompanied by power.

As a manager, Clough enjoyed the advantage of relative youth, which helped him to glamorise management in the late 1960s and early 1970s and give it an almost film-star sheen. When he secured promotion to the First Division for Derby in 1969, he was thirty-four years old. His contemporaries were ancient by comparison. Joe Mercer (Manchester City) was fifty-five. Bill Shankly (Liverpool) was fifty-four, and Bertie Mee (Arsenal) and Joe Harvey (Newcastle) were both fifty-one. Bill Nicholson (Tottenham) and Harry Catterick (Everton) were fifty. Don Revie was forty-two, but looked ten years older; perhaps it was the pressure of managing Leeds. When Clough took Forest into the First Division eight years later, all but one of those managers (Revie) had retired.

Clough didn’t merely represent the start of a new generation, he shaped it too. In the early 1980s, after Forest’s two European Cup wins, the lower divisions seemed to me to be awash with Clough clones. I met one who came to the City Ground in the manner of a pilgrim worshipping at a shrine. He looked like a very bad insomniac, gaunt and hollow-eyed with a putty-coloured complexion. As I listened to him talk about discipline, as though a big stick was enough to guarantee quivering obedience, I realised how badly he wanted to be Clough, but what was also clear was his utter failure to appreciate the people skills of the man he venerated. He had, perhaps unknowingly, begun to imitate some of Clough’s gestures, and the inflections in his voice and a few of his expressions had infiltrated his vocabulary. I thought of the old line about one Shakespeare and many Hamlets.

Clough got some things horribly wrong. His fear that live TV would soon kill football was quickly discredited. His criticism of successive England managers stemmed from the suppurating wounds that the Football Association inflicted on him. No one, he felt, could do a better job with England than the face he saw every morning in the shaving mirror. His criticism of players and other managers was frequently unfair.

But another thing about him, and a major reason to admire the man, was his refreshing philosophy about how the game ought to be approached. Style mattered, and Clough fell into the category of high-minded aesthetician. It wasn’t enough to win – he wanted to win playing beautiful football. He wanted the ball passed elegantly, as if it were on a thread, from player to player, preferring creative intuition to brute force. He demanded style as well as discipline.

As Clough saw it, teams who played the long ball were horned devils. He said to me: ‘Any idiot can coach a group of players to whack the ball as hard and as high as possible, and then gallop after it. Give me time, and I could train a monkey to do that and stick it in the circus. What pleasure does anyone get watching a side like that? You may as well go plane spotting at Heathrow –’ cos you’d find yourself staring at the sky all the time, and then you’d go home with a stiff neck.’ When he talked that way, his eyes became flinty, and the skin around his mouth tightened into a snarl. He would jab out his right hand, like a southpaw sparring in the gym.

The game, Clough argued idealistically, was simple. He would lay a towel on the floor of the dressing room and place a ball at the centre of it, striving to make a mental symbol of it take hold in a player’s mind. ‘This ball is your best friend,’ he would say. ‘Love it, caress it.’ He preached the simplicity of football with the passion of a TV evangelist. The game, he said, is ‘the most straightforward on God’s earth – beautiful grass, a ball, a defined space in which to play it.’

Clough believed that everything in life was overcomplicated and that most coaches were guilty of overcomplicating football, as if it were ‘something like nuclear physics and Einstein had written a book about it’. A pained expression crossed his face whenever he heard coaches talk about ‘systems’ or saw chalk lines scratched on the blackboard. He looked at ‘Subutteo men being pushed around a felt pitch’ with disgust. ‘Get the ball,’ he said. ‘Give it to your mate or try to go past someone. Score a goal. Make the people watching you feel as if there’s been some skill, some flair in what you’ve done.’

Near the end of what was to become his penultimate season in 1992, I was walking back from the training ground with him. We talked about football as entertainment. ‘You know why so many people queue up for hours to look at the Mona Lisa?’ he asked, all ready to roll out his own answer. ‘’Cos it’s an attractive piece of work. It moves them. They feel the same way about a beautiful woman, like Marilyn Monroe. They feel the same way about a statue or a building. They even feel the same way about a sunrise. Now if we’re half as good-looking as a football team as Mona, Marilyn or a sunrise, then we might get one or two people prepared to come and see us every Saturday – even if it’s pissing down.’

No team, Clough believed, could claim to be ascetically superior if a streak of ill-discipline or a tendency to wantonly bend the rules ran through it. That, he said, is why he so ‘hated’ Revie’s Leeds.

On a Friday he 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 …’

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