SOCCER: Death of Brian Clough: Brian Clough may not have been the most successful manager in English football but he was surely the most remarkable. Other managers have won more trophies, but few have won more loyalty from players or fans or excited the wrath of the game's establishment more often.
Clough's genius for turning ordinary footballers into consistently winning teams will never be equalled. His 28-year career in management stopped short of the era of the millionaires' dressing-room in which players are now deciding a manager's future by their attitudes off the field as well as their performances on it.
The financial polarisation of the game since the onset of first the Premier League makes it well-nigh impossible to believe that anyone could now take over two teams from outside the top division and turn them into champions.
Between 1967 and 1980 Clough transformed the East Midlands backwaters of Derby County and Nottingham Forest into footballing mainstreams. At Hartlepool, at 30, he had become the youngest manager in the league after injury cut short his playing career at Sunderland. Within two years of his arrival at the Baseball Ground, Derby had won promotion; another three and they were league champions.
Clough wasted even less time at the City Ground, where promotion in 1977 was followed immediately by first the league title, then two successive European Cup triumphs.
This, however, was less than half the story. Clough will be remembered even more for what he was than what he achieved as player and manager.
He may have scored the quickest 200 goals in the English game (219 matches to be precise), but it was the quickness of his tongue that in next to no time earned him national recognition. Clough's became the most mimicked voice in the country. From professional impressionist to public bar wit they were all at it: " 'ey, yoong man . . !" became a catchphrase.
Clough talked a lot of sense articulately. He also talked a load of twaddle, equally articulately. A microphone, and especially a television camera, unleashed a flow of ideas, criticisms, asides, one-liners and insults. At a time when players and managers tended to talk in strangled cliches Clough was a gift to the media and, inevitably, an embarrassment to the authorities.
He first met Peter Taylor when they were playing for Middlesbrough in the mid-1950s. Clough was a teenage prodigy, Taylor the reserve goalkeeper. A mutual understanding was quickly established that would take the pair into a management partnership that dominated much of English football in the 1970s.
The combination of Taylor's judgment of people and Clough's singular powers of motivation elevated a succession of worthy but modest footballers into national figures.
John Robertson, a podgy Scot with no great pace, became one of the best wingers of his era under Clough at Forest. Kenny Burns, an untamed defender with Birmingham City, became the epitome of self-discipline.
Not that Clough was a shrinking violet when it came to big signings. In February 1979, Trevor Francis became the first British million-pound transfer when he joined Forest from Birmingham.
Perhaps his most significant trip to the transfer market was one of his earliest, namely the day in 1968 when he persuaded Dave Mackay to move from Tottenham to Derby. The arrival of Mackay made Derby County a serious team and Clough a manager to be taken seriously.
The press touted him for the England job whenever the team hit a bad patch. That England did not qualify for a World Cup or the latter stages of a European Championship between 1970 and 1980 meant this happened often.
Brian Clough's last home match as Nottingham Forest manager was on May 1st, 1993, a good day for a lifelong Labour man to bow out. That afternoon saw both Forest and Middlesbrough, his alma mater, relegated. A weeping female fan presented Clough with a red rose. "There, there luv . . ." said Cloughie and went home to listen to his Ink Spots records.
By then the drink had already taken its toll. Few that afternoon would have bet on Clough still being around more than 10 years later. In the end he died of cancer.
The impact made by yesterday's news of his death was a tribute to the lasting impression he had, not only on football but on the English nation's psyche in a dull decade. People did not always agree with Brian Clough but they always paid attention. So did his players.
