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

In memory of my parents James and Jenny Hamilton

Contents

Title Page Dedication Prologue: If Only Football Could Be That Much Fun … Chapter One: Who The Fuck Are You? Chapter Two: The Shop Window … And The Goods At The Back Chapter Three: What A Wast Chapter Four: Striking Gold In Mansfield Chapter Five: Don’T Mention The War Chapter Six: The Average Fa Councillor’s Knowledge Of Football Chapter Seven: Wrestling Sigmund Freud Chapter Eight: There May Be Trouble Ahead … Chapter Nine: Walk Around And Booze Chapter Ten: Even Clark Gable Gets Wrinkles Chapter Eleven: Don’T Forget Me Epilogue: The Greatest Manager Of All Time … Even If I Do Sat So Myself Timeline Goalscoring Record Acknowledgements P.S.: Ideas, Interviews & Features … About the Author Copyright About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

If only football could be that much fun …

The best account of what it is like to be a football reporter was written by B. S. Johnson, an experimental novelist and poet who regularly covered matches for The Observer. His novel The Unfortunates, published in the late 1960s, is Johnson’s ‘book in a box’, an example of modernist literature. It consists of twenty-seven unbound chapters which, except for the first and the last, can be read in any order. The idea, argued Johnson, was to convey the arbitrary nature of thought.

Johnson was a lugubrious man. The Unfortunates is the mournful story of an unnamed narrator (actually Johnson himself) who arrives by train at an unnamed city (coincidentally Nottingham) to cover a football match. He takes a plunge into his past. The surroundings – ‘I know this city’ – awaken in him rich slices of memory that rise up and wash over him like waves. And thus, improbable as it may sound, on a grey Saturday afternoon he drifts from meditations on football and football writing into reflections on life and death. Unlike Bill Shankly, he comes to the conclusion that life is more important than football can ever be.

The sections of the book about football are evocative. Johnson’s narrator reports on a match between City and United – names chosen, I’d imagine, because they represent the game’s Everyman – and slowly peels away the misconceptions about the free seat in the press box. Johnson is miserable and unforgiving, and he has an acid tongue.

Given the number of matches a reporter is obliged to sit through over the course of a season – in my experience, anywhere between sixty and a hundred – and the number of words he has to write about each of them, it isn’t difficult to become, like Johnson’s character, so disillusioned with the trade that cynicism sets in and hardens like cement.

To the outsider, football reporting, like much of what happens inside newspaper offices, gives off a strong glow of romance and glamour, recalling old movies about the press: a hard-bitten, tough-guy, trilby-wearing Bogart balancing a drooping cigarette on the edge of his lip in Deadline USA, or a workaholic Jack Hawkins beating himself into exhaustion in Front Page Story. It’s a world of typewriters, eyeshades and braces, saloon bars and harassed men in belted trench coats bellowing down black, megaphone-sized telephones to a pouting blonde copy-taker. Amid the clatter of the keyboards and the twisted vines of cigarette smoke, each day is a swirl of gripping, unforgettable events.

If only. The truth, especially in the provinces, is that newspaper reporting is often a mundane, repetitive slog: season after season of unbearably joyless matches, one so indistinguishable from another that it becomes impossible – without examining the statistics of teams and goalscorers in Rothmans Football Yearbook – to tell them apart. I came into journalism specifically for the free seat. I wanted to watch sport without paying for the privilege, and sports writing seemed like a decent alternative to real work. Soon I began to understand what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when he wrote that it is a better thing to travel hopefully than to arrive.

The beautiful game can seem ugly and dull when viewed through tired and jaded eyes. It looks worse when in early March you find yourself recycling phrases, already soiled by overuse, that you originally wrote in August or September. Worse still, after a while you learn to routinely fabricate an emotional response to something about which you feel absolutely nothing. This is exactly what Johnson conveys so well in The Unfortunates:

Always, at the start of each match, the excitement, often the only moment of excitement, that this might be the ONE match, the match in which someone betters Payne’s ten goals, where Hughie Gallacher after being floored nods one in while sitting down, where the extraordinary happens, something that makes it stand out, the match one remembers and talks about for years afterwards, the rest of one’s life. The one moment, the one match. A new beginning, is it? But already I suspect the worst … have to be prepared, as always, in everything, to settle for less.

Even a cursory flick through Jonathan Coe’s biography of Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, reveals a man not only at odds with life but tragically soured by it. His bitter dissatisfactions, frustrations and, eventually, profound unhappiness led to his suicide in 1973. None of this devalues Johnson’s opinions. Whatever his demons, the darts he threw from the pages of The Unfortunates always fell near, or directly inside, the bullseye. He knew. He had been there and felt it.

When Johnson buys a football paper, bowed by the weight of stale phrases such as ‘star-studded forward line’ and ‘shooting boots’, he says, relieved: ‘I don’t have to write that sort of preliminary speculative meaningless crap. Just my own kind of crap.’

Handed the attendance figure on a slip of paper, he laments: ‘24,833 poor sods have paid good money to see this rubbish’, and later tartly adds: ‘Not even a bloody quote from the crowd … cowed by seeing rubbish like this nearly every week, I should think.’

He complains about the press box dirt that ‘blows across my pages’ and the ‘cramped seat’. He is scathing about the ‘Heavy Mob’ – his sobriquet for red-top tabloid reporters, who are castigated as ‘the well paid pseuds … armed to the teeth (with) Colour and Metaphor’.

Most significantly, however, he puts across the monotonous grind of weekly football reporting and its ritualistic language – the words manufactured in a mechanical, depressing way as if by a blank-eyed factory worker turning out rivets. In a single sentence he sums up the way I often felt towards the end of a season, sometimes in the middle of it: ‘Bollocks to this stinking match.’

Johnson was lucky – he was a part-timer. His football reporting supplemented the serious work of creating novels and poems. Although Johnson complained about it – and about the subeditors who, he thought, desecrated his copy with crass, overzealous use of the blue pencil – he pressed on with football writing because he was at heart a football man. He arrived at a ground each Saturday hoping that he wouldn’t be disappointed again.

How well I knew that feeling. For seventeen years I covered football for two freelance agencies, one national newspaper and for the Nottingham Evening Post. Apart from one season covering Notts County (which, because of its manager, Jimmy Sirrel, was like dropping into the Fifth Circle of Dante’s Hell), I followed Nottingham Forest.

A word or two about Sirrel. He looked like a garden gnome that had been roughed up a bit. He had bug eyes and his nose was bent and flat, as if someone had struck him in the face with an iron. I found him devoid of charm and uncooperative, to the extent that I could barely get a word out of him. Once, pleading for a story, I fell back on the weakest of all arguments: ‘Well, Jim, the fans will want to know what’s going on.’ Sirrel, a Glaswegian, replied, ‘Aw, fuck the fans.’

My morning phone call to him had previously gone one of two ways.

‘Morning Jim. Lovely day.’

‘If you think so, you write it,’ he’d reply.

Or, ‘Good morning Jim. Lovely day.’

‘Aye, but not if you’re dead, is it, eh?’

I couldn’t explore the ‘What if …’ scenario with Sirrel either. ‘Aye,’ he’d say, ‘if ma granny had a dicky than she would’nae be my granny.’

I can’t imagine that any football reporter has physically strangled to death the manager of the club he covered. But there were a lot of occasions when I would gladly have put my hands around Sirrel’s neck, squeezed hard and taken my chances. I longed to escape across the River Trent. That’s where you found Brian Clough. Although he was frightening and obstreperous, Clough would give you a line – provided, of course, he was prepared to speak to you in the first place. And after that one season covering Notts County, my wish came true.

I can only guess at the number of Nottingham Forest matches I watched. At a rough calculation, it was possibly more than a thousand at all levels: first team and reserves, and occasionally the youth side too, which meant getting lime from the still-damp touchline markings on my best (and usually only) pair of shoes, on a pitch in a park. The youth games, normally played in front of the proverbial dog and a few retired men with nothing better to do, were a miniature exhibition of Clough’s peculiarities. Unpredictable is not the half of it.

Often I watched these games standing beside Clough. When he yelled at full volume it was like being pressed against the speakers at an Iron Maiden concert. I could feel my bones vibrate. Some of the opposition youth-team players were so tremblingly afraid of that volcanic bark, and kept such a distance from him, that you could build a small house on the part of the pitch near where Clough stood. Entire matches were played in midfield. If the worst happened, and the ball went out of play, he had a habit of retrieving it from the bushes and hurling it back with great force, aiming the ball directly at the groin of the unfortunate player sent to take the throw-in. ‘I aim at the bollocks,’ he said to me with a mischievous grin. ‘It keeps ’em on their toes.’

With Clough, you could take nothing for granted. Like a hornet, he stung people indiscriminately. I didn’t mind, though; he wasn’t Jimmy Sirrel. I spent many waking hours of my life with Clough in his office, in cars or coaches, trains or planes – so many, in fact, that if you strung them together they would certainly add up to a year or two. And I count myself as very fortunate. Unlike B. S. Johnson, I saw a lot of memorable matches, the matches that stay with you for the rest of your life.

On an August night in Barcelona, after a downpour so intense that the rain seemed to hang from the sky in a single flat sheet, I saw the stubby-framed Diego Maradona perform juggling and conjuring tricks in a pre-season friendly. Maradona was two months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, and three years away from the football immortality – and notoriety – that the 1986 World Cup would guarantee him.

I can still see him now. He sets off on a slanting fifteen-yard run across the Nou Camp, flicking the ball up with the toe of his boot because it refuses to roll on the water-drenched surface. It’s like a one-man game of keepy-uppy. The white ball glistens under the lights as if it’s been highly polished. Three red-shirted defenders dive in and are casually beaten. The defenders turn in open-mouthed incredulity at what’s happened to them before setting off in fruitless pursuit, as if chasing a pickpocket down a street. But it’s too late. Maradona reaches the box and, finishing his work with a flourish, he lifts the ball with his toe for the last time and volleys it into the net. He raises his left hand in a modest salute. It is the hand that will punch a goal past Peter Shilton, the hand that will eventually hold the World Cup.

On successive Saturdays in September 1986, I saw Forest comprehensively dismantle first Aston Villa and then Chelsea. This pair of results, 6–0 and 6–2, were beautifully described as looking on paper like a routine first-round match for Martina Navratilova.

I saw Forest claw back a two-goal deficit in a European Cup semi-final against Cologne on a ploughed field of a pitch. The City Ground mud clung to the players’ boots like glue, yet John Robertson, Garry Birtles and Tony Woodcock seemed to be running on silk. The match finished 3–3.

A year later, in 1980, I saw Forest retain the European Cup on a May evening in Madrid against Hamburg. The air was heavy, the sky like glass. I remember afterwards briefly holding one of the handles of the silver trophy, reaching out for it the way a wide-eyed infant would stretch to touch a coloured bauble on a Christmas tree.

I was there when Forest played West Ham at home at the end of the 1985–86 season and a Dutchman called Johnny Metgod – one of the players I regarded as a friend – hit the ball so hard that I thought it would burst. Metgod took a free kick to the right of the box, about twenty yards out. The ball appeared to me to travel in a straight, rising line of white light before it filled the net. The crowd, in stunned disbelief, were mute for a moment, but then the noise began, so loud it could have perforated eardrums.

And each Saturday I saw the skills of John Robertson, the grace of Trevor Francis and Martin O’Neill, and I watched Peter Shilton save shots that looked unreachable for mere mortals.

There was a downside. I spent too much of my time on motorways. I ate too much takeaway food and sandwiches in plastic wrapping. I stood hunched in car parks in the blowing rain waiting for a pimply-skinned player to toss me a cliché. I wrote match reports in the early hours of cold, midweek mornings, the fierce glare of the office lights burning my eyes, the nightly vacuuming of the carpet roaring in my ears.

Despite his eccentricities – and there were an awful lot of them – Clough made it all interesting and, for the most part, worthwhile. A football reporter in the provinces is in a position which is privileged yet at times almost impossible. He is privileged because representing the local paper is a golden key that opens most doors. You can build up an unrivalled relationship with the manager and the players because you are in contact with them every day. A spurious intimacy evolves between you. You share so much with the characters you write about that you can pretty much corner the market in quotes.

Of course, that access comes at an exorbitant cost. Closeness to the team, and any emotional attachment to it, horribly distorts the line between candid reporting and scarf-waving support. Too many journalists succumb, seduced by the insider knowledge fed to them, and begin to identify with the glory or misfortune of their team. The football world soon divides into ‘them and us’. It is all too easy to become overprotective or self-censoring, so that criticism is either wrapped in cotton wool or disguised in nebulous, worn euphemisms. Contacts become friends, and human nature takes over. You don’t want to lose your place at the manager’s table.

A reporter even half-decent at his job is guaranteed to gather a notebook’s-worth of information which has been given to him in the strictest confidence. He is privy to so much that for various reasons has to go unreported. The manager knows that the reporter will not break his trust: the consequences would be too dire. The reporter has daily space to fill, yet another deadline or back-page lead to write. The editor back at the office probably neither understands nor, even if he does, is sympathetic to the shaky high-wire act you perform, and which obliges you to find the balance between diplomacy and full disclosure – something, in other words, which benefits both the newspaper and the club.

If you do upset anyone – and a mild falling-out usually happened at least twice a month in my case – the golden key is snatched out of your hand. You are shut out or banned. A total ban arrived for me, like Christmas, once a year. The most spectacular of them came after I had written a report critical of a Saturday League match. Clough regarded the report as a ‘bag of shit’. After the next game, a Wednesday-night UEFA Cup tie which Forest won without overtaxing themselves, Clough sent a breathless apprentice to the press box to summon me to the dressing room. Inside, Clough came at me like a bullet. Emerging out of the steam that poured from the showers, he pointed to the wall. He had cut out my match report and pinned it there. The headline read: REDS MORALE NOSE DIVES.

Clough’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared. He leaned right over me, his hot breath on my face. ‘I didn’t need a fucking motivational talk tonight. I just had to show them the shit you’d written. Now, I’ve got a message for you. Take your fucking portable typewriter and stick it up your arse. You’re banned. You’re fucking banned for ever from this ground. Fucking for ever.’

The captain, Ian Bowyer, still wrapped in a towel, looked at me pityingly and shook his head. The goalkeeper, Hans van Breukelen – who hadn’t played that night – pressed his index finger silently to his lips to dissuade me from replying. I remember Garry Birtles staring at his bare feet and then sensibly moving away. He gave me the sort of supportive sideways glance that I took to mean, ‘Just tough it out. The storm will pass.’

However, it carried on for half a minute more, which for me was like an hour. Clough’s voice grew louder and I thought he might spontaneously combust. I was standing in the centre of the dressing room, pathetically limp and embarrassed, with my notebook redundant in my hand. I wanted the steam from the showers to descend like a fog and hide me. ‘You come into this club and we treat you like a friend,’ Clough raged. ‘And you fucking insult us. You know fuck all about this game. Fuck all. Don’t stand there, just fuck off!’

I exited – downcast, angry, silent, and feeling as though I had been scalded by a branding iron. As I walked the two and a quarter miles back to the office, I thought about his machine-gun use of the F-word. This was, after all, the man who had once tried to dissuade his own supporters from using bad language by erecting a sign at the City Ground that read ‘Gentleman, no swearing please’.

Two days later, on a Friday lunchtime when I ought to have been collecting team news, I was sitting at my desk trying to think if there was anything already in my notebook that I might turn into a readable story for the following night’s edition. The phone rang.

‘Where are you, shithouse?’ asked Clough. (He used the word ‘shithouse’ as frequently as other people use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. ‘It’s an affectionate term,’ he’d explain – though he didn’t always use it that way.)

‘Er, you banned me. You told me never to come back to the ground,’ I said, and heard in return a sigh of mock exasperation.

‘Fucking hell, fucking hell. Don’t be such a stupid bugger. Get your arse down here. I didn’t mean it. Spur of the moment thing. Gone and forgotten now. Come down and we’ll have a drink. I’ve a got a story for you. Fancy a glass of champagne?’

I paused. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Provided you don’t kiss me.’

‘You’re too fucking ugly for that,’ he said, and slammed the phone down.

He was waiting for me at the door. ‘There’s a Scotch for you,’ he said. ‘Get it down you and I’ll fetch the champagne.’

I stayed well into the late autumn afternoon and left hopelessly drunk on Bell’s Whisky. We never got to the champagne. My notebook was choked with stories.

Of course, no football reporter knows everything. A fair amount of what he writes is largely intelligent guesswork, a decent stab at trying to understand what is happening from the evidence – first hand or empirical – that he has gathered from various sources. Clough, being Clough, took a different view.

‘If you’re going to work with me, and we’re going to build a relationship, I’ll tell you the lot,’ he said at the beginning, which was a blatant untruth. What he meant was that I would be told 90 per cent of what was going on 85 per cent of the time – but that wasn’t a bad return.

And so it began, an extraordinary journey with a contradictory, Chinese box of a man – idiosyncratic, eccentric, wholly unpredictable from one blink of an eye to the next, and unfathomably difficult to burrow to the core of. I saw him at his very best and at his very worst.

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, and he often went out of his way to be no bother to anybody. Ken Smales, Forest’s secretary, said that Clough could be like a sheep in wolf ’s clothing or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but that ‘mostly he was just himself’, a description which perfectly encapsulated my problem in the minute or two before our daily meetings: which Brian Clough was going to turn up?

Flowers were sent as routinely as other people posted greetings cards. Friends found gambling debts, mortgage arrears and bills paid anonymously. Even strangers, if he got to hear about their plight and regarded it as unjust, might find themselves bailed out of financial difficulty. He did it quietly and on the strict understanding that there would be no publicity involved.

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 boldly, and with no hesitation in my voice, that he shouldn’t feel privileged because I stammered to all and sundry. ‘What’s the cure?’ he asked. I said there wasn’t one; once a stammerer, nearly always a stammerer. He pressed on: ‘When do you stammer the most?’ I said that talking on the phone was always difficult because you couldn’t use the natural pauses that punctuate face-to-face conversation to your advantage. ‘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.

When he was at his worst, and especially when drinking brought out the darker side of his personality, covering Forest was like being ordered around at gunpoint. All the same, I followed Clough with the growing astonishment that Boswell must have felt walking with Johnson across the Western Isles. What Boswell said about Johnson also fitted Clough to a tee: he had ‘a great ambition to excel’, and a ‘jealous independence of spirit, and impetuosity of temper’. Not much, he did.

Looking back, and putting what I saw into context, Clough’s eighteen years at the City Ground was a period of madness punctuated by wonderful bursts of sanity. I don’t know how I survived it without (a) becoming an alcoholic or (b) being confined to a padded cell at some point.

Since the spit and polish of Sky TV reinvented the game, everyone has a team to support, colours to wear, a result to search for on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. Everyone is suddenly an expert too, from the strategy of 4–4–2 and the sweeper system to set pieces and diagonal runs from ‘the hole.’ It wasn’t always like that. Given today’s obsession with football, and the way it is anchored in social and cultural life, it can be difficult to imagine what the game was like before the convulsions of the 1990s turned it into a designer sport.

In the 1970s, when hooliganism ran across it like a ghastly scar, football wasn’t just out of kilter with fashion. It was regarded as faintly repellent, like a sour smell, by most of those who never passed through the turnstiles. I knew a lot of people who genuinely believed that the scene before a typical Saturday afternoon game resembled Lowry’s melancholic painting Going to the Match: dark, whippet-thin fans in flat caps and mufflers, bent into a slicing wind, and the skyline around each ground smudged by smoke from factory chimneys. Football to them was crude, a prehistoric pastime, and redolent of a distant past featuring dubbin, cheap liniment and steel-toecapped boots. Even by the 1980s, when the implications of the tragedies at Heysel, Bradford and Hillsborough were absorbed and football began to look at itself afresh, it was still a struggle to weld together a convincing argument for its future health.