Remembering Brian Clough, 20 years since his death: ‘He touched people’s lives’

This is an updated version of a piece from last May that marked 30 years since Brian Clough’s final game as a manager.

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Scene One: Derbyshire

“Don’t send me flowers when I’m dead. If you like me, send them while I’m alive.”

The graveyard is set back from the main road. Its residents, you suspect, might never have realised they would be in the presence of greatness. Down the path, past the war memorial, through the gates and, tucked away to the right, look for the daffodils.

There is nothing showy about the gravestone for Brian Clough and his wife, Barbara. It is not the biggest in the churchyard. You might even miss it were your eyes not drawn to that bloom of bright yellow.

He always loved daffodils, Brian. And, on his walks with Barbara, he liked to serenade her with one of his favourite songs, Jimmy McHugh’s On the Sunny Side of the Street. The final line of his epitaph, embossed in gold on the black granite, feels like one last piece of typical Clough.

“Walking Together In The Sunshine,” it says.

It will be 20 years on Friday since Clough’s death and, even if his managerial career deserved a happier ending, there was a lot of sunshine while he sprinkled his precious magic over, first, Derby County and then Nottingham Forest.

Clough lived in a beautiful white house, The Elms, in the village of Quarndon, among the rolling countryside of Derbyshire’s Amber Valley. He moved, post-retirement, to neighbouring Darley Abbey and then Duffield, just up the A6, so he could live next door to his grandchildren. But it was Quarndon where he spent his peak years, winning English league titles with two clubs and back-to-back European Cups with Forest.

The Elms was opposite the cricket ground, which suited Clough if he ever had a spare weekend, and had a long driveway illuminated by the kind of external lighting that could seem pretty fancy in the late 1980s. It was, for Clough, one of the perks of being the face of East Midlands Electricity, appearing in a series of TV adverts.

Not that Clough liked anyone prying behind the strategically tall hedgerows that helped him, and his family, maintain a semblance of privacy during the years when he was the most talked-about manager in the business.

In March 1988, The Daily Mirror ran a story about where he lived and an incensed Clough used his programme notes for Forest’s next game to make the point that he was not particularly keen on “some photographer pointing his lens through the trees in my garden to get a picture”.

Except, Clough being Clough, that was never likely to be the end of it. He was aware that David Moore, the newspaper’s Midlands correspondent, lived in the next village and that appealed to Clough’s sense of mischief.

“I wonder how Mr and Mrs Moore will feel when I have a photograph taken of their home and copies placed in the local post office window,” he wrote. “They will soon find out.”

And he meant it: a photographer was sent round and, in Clough’s next programme notes, he noted with considerable triumph that the pictures of the Moore residence had, as promised, been put on display in shop windows in Duffield and Allestree.

He always liked to get the last word, Cloughie.

And that, in a nutshell, is how football fans of certain generations tend to remember a man who spent 18 years at Forest and has a statue in Nottingham, another in Derby and a third in Middlesbrough.

Clough, lest it ever be forgotten, was the man who said of Frank Sinatra, “He met me once, you know.”

He was the man — perhaps the only man — who verbally jousted with Muhammad Ali and got the better of the self-proclaimed Greatest (“Clough, I’ve had enough!”).

Ever heard about the time he talked someone down from jumping off Trent Bridge? Or what really happened when he gave some pitch invaders a whack for running on his precious surface… and they apologised to him?

The Clough family still live just outside Derby. Nigel has a 26-year managerial career that has taken in Burton Albion, Derby and Sheffield United and involved winning promotion from League Two last season with Mansfield Town, where his brother, Simon, is the head of recruitment. A generation of Forest fans knew Nigel, Forest’s record post-war scorer, as the “nice young man”. Yet he is now the same age, 58, as his father at the time of his retirement.

“Even now, there will be people coming up to me because they want to talk about him,” says Nigel. “It still happens, almost every day. Everyone’s got a story, everyone’s got a tale, a favourite memory. ‘I was here,’ they’ll say, ‘I met your dad once.’ He seemed to have met about half the country.

“People would come up to him and say, ‘I was in the armed forces, I served with you’. He’d say, ‘Yes, you and half a million others’. It’s lovely, because they are always stories about how he touched people’s lives, even for just a fleeting moment.”

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Scene Two: Ipswich

“I want no epitaphs of profound history and all that type of thing. I contributed. I would hope they would say that, and I would hope somebody liked me.”

Portman Road, home of Ipswich Town. The date is May 8, 1993, and James Scowcroft, one of Ipswich’s youth-team players, is going through his chores, sweeping brush in hand.

Scowcroft would go on to become a popular striker for Ipswich, making more than 200 appearances for the club. Back then, however, he was 17, yet to make his first-team debut, and this was the era when apprentices had a list of match-day chores.

“We all had specific jobs and mine was to look after the away dressing rooms,” he says. “I had to make sure everything was tidy and organised. So I used to go in five minutes before kick-off, while all the players were waiting in the tunnel, to get a head start making sure everything was ready for half-time.”

That day, however, was different. It was Clough’s final league match of a managerial career in which, to quote the man himself, he would not necessarily describe himself as the best in the business, but “certainly in the top one”. The world’s media had descended on Portman Road to see the final, emotional goodbye.

“A few minutes before kick-off, I had a look through the door to check the Forest dressing room was empty,” says Scowcroft. “All the players were in the tunnel, all the medical staff had come out. I went in, got my broom out and started tidying, putting stuff in the bin. Then I looked in the mirror on the far wall and, bloody hell, Brian Clough was sitting behind the door.

“A lot of managers in that position might have reacted badly and said, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing in here?’.

“I froze. ‘I’m really sorry’, I said, ‘I didn’t realise…’. And he just sat there. ‘Hey son, what position do you play?’. I told him I was a centre-forward and he started asking more questions. ‘Do you work on your heading, son? Do you score goals, young man?’.

“It was just me and him, one of the final team-talks of his life. I remember him telling me, ‘You’ve got to work hard, keep working hard’. And then, when it was time for him to go, I could see he was crying. I thought he was going to shake my hand. ‘Come here, son’, he said. Then he gave me the biggest hug I have ever had in my life. I could hardly breathe. He gave me a kiss on the cheek and then he walked out.”

The saddest part of this story is that Clough was not in a good way by that stage. For the first time in his life, he was experiencing failure. The man who had performed a football miracle in Nottingham had spiralled into alcoholism. His face was reddened and pockmarked and his mind no longer blessed with the razor-sharp judgment that had taken an unfashionable football club from Nowheresville, languishing below halfway in the old Second Division, and turned them into the kings of Europe.

And yet, what does it say for the man that the Nottingham Post brought out a 48-page souvenir pullout last year to mark the 30th anniversary since his final match? Or that, among the thousands of words, there was only one cursory line, buried away, to record that his final alcohol-affected season ended with his team at the bottom of the Premier League and relegated back to the second tier?

Just consider what happened in Clough’s final league game at the City Ground the previous weekend, when the entire away end, filled with thousands of Sheffield United supporters, rose to their feet to sing his name. Have you ever seen such a thing in your life?

That night, before the highlights were shown on BBC’s Match of the Day, the presenter, Des Lynam, diverted viewers to some pre-match interviews with Forest supporters outside the ground. And, watching that footage again, it can feel a world apart from the ‘Wenger Out’ culture that caught hold of football in the following years.

Soundbites included “one bad season doesn’t make him a bad manager”, “he’s the best thing that ever happened to Nottingham” and a rather heartbreaking “I don’t know what to do without him, really”.

One woman, wearing a red and white hat, seemed close to tears. “I’ve just taken him some flowers but they wouldn’t let me give them to him because he’s in the bath. So I said I could come in and scrub his back.”

Strictly speaking, there was still one more assignment, one more curtain call, and it came at home to Notts County in the final of Nottinghamshire’s County Cup. Forest won 3-0 to give Clough the final trophy of his career — and, again, he was swallowed up by the crowd’s love.

What the fans didn’t see was the scene, an hour or so after the ground had cleared, as Clough sat in his office listening to Sinatra and the Ink Spots.

Craig Bromfield was sitting on the floor and, if you are not familiar with his name, perhaps you should acquaint yourself with the remarkable story of how Clough opened his home to a 12-year-old boy from a troubled family in the north east.

Bromfield’s story has since been turned into a book, Be Good, Love Brian, and he has never forgotten that final evening inside Clough’s office.

“His inner circle was inside. Amid the music, Brian kept telling people not to cry, not on his behalf. There was a bewildered sadness that it had all come to this. He sat back in his chair, nursing a drink and his memories. ‘Pete should be here’, he said, with his eyes closed. ‘Pete should be here’.”

Pete was Peter Taylor, who had once been Clough’s assistant, confidante and best friend before a spectacular fallout that he always regretted.

And, to use a Cloughism, the young Bromfield knew when to say nowt.

He and Clough travelled back to Quarndon together. “When we got back, we took the dog for a walk. We didn’t exchange a word. Brian simply stood in the middle of the common, humming away to himself and gazing at the stars.”

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Scene Three: Middlesbrough

“To me, scoring goals was just like other boys might regard delivering papers. I just did it — every day.”

It’s here where it all started: 11 Valley Road, Middlesbrough. This is the house where Clough, the sixth of nine children, was born and raised. There is a green plaque to mark that fact with pride.

Behind the house, there is the field where he learned to kick a ball and it is just up the road to Albert Park, where you can find the statue of a young Clough, boots hanging over his shoulder, on his way to work.

This was the route he used to take to Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough’s old ground, in the days when Clough was one of the more prolific scorers in English football. “Get that ball over to me,” as he used to tell his team-mates. “I’m here to put it in the net, not you.”

Opposite the park’s entrance, where there is now a pawnbroker and an estate agent, there used to be Rea’s cafe and ice cream parlour, owned by the family of singer Chris Rea. It was here that Clough met one of the loves of his life, Barbara (“with a smile as wide as Stockton High Street”), and talked tactics with another, Peter Taylor, then Middlesbrough’s goalkeeper.

“I can’t think of anyone in any walk of life, let alone sport, who has three statues in different towns or cities,” says Rob Nichols, a Middlesbrough fan who played a key role in the statue fund-raising campaign.

“He also has a road named after him, Clough Close, next to the old Ayresome Park. There is another one, the Brian Clough Way, linking the two cities, Nottingham and Derby, who are bitter rivals in every other way.

“If he had stayed at Sunderland a bit longer, he might have had a fourth statue, too. Quite a few people who came forward with donations for the statue told us how, back in the day, they shifted from watching Middlesbrough to Sunderland because they loved Brian Clough so much.

“Sunderland were, and are, our bitter rivals. It might seem unthinkable to leave one club for another. But that was Clough’s power.”

It is just a pity, perhaps, that the statue has been surrounded by protective fencing for the last few years.

“When the statue was put up, the family were keen that Brian, being a man of the people, wouldn’t like being on a plinth,” says Nichols, editor of Middlesbrough fanzine Fly Me to the Moon. “But that means people can go right up to the statue to have their photos taken and, over time, it has caused some stress fractures. It’s not vandalism, more that people like being up close to it.”

Bernie Slaven, a former Middlesbrough striker, started a petition last year to move the statue to the Riverside Stadium, the club’s home since 1997. More than 1,200 people added their names. But nothing has come of it and the Clough family, for the record, are happy where it is, close to the house he described as “my little bit of paradise”.

“It was always my mum’s favourite statue because it showed him in his playing days,” says Nigel. “That’s where he was born and bred and grew up. He used to jog through the park and we all thought it was fitting that the statue depicted him as a young man. It obviously meant something to a lot of people. When they were fundraising for the statue, there were people bungee-jumping off the Transporter Bridge to raise money.”

Brian and Barbara were married just round the corner at St Barnabas church and, a few years back, there was even a guided walk, the Brian Clough Trail, taking in all these sights as well as the terraced house, 20 Bell Street, where Don Revie, his great rival at Leeds United, grew up.

Roger Hermiston, author of Clough & Revie: The Rivals Who Changed the Face of English Football, arranged the walk because he was “fascinated that two great characters who loathed each other in later life came from the same town”.

Revie won two league championships for Leeds and, if you ever want to see Clough in his absolute pomp, watch the Calendar TV special, Goodbye Mr Clough, from the night in 1974 his own spell at Elland Road, lasting only 44 days, ended in the sack.

The footage just gets better with age. Watch his almost boyish joy — immaculately coiffed hair, eyes twinkling, slim and dapper in a pale-grey suit — when he realises he has got under the skin of the man who is sitting to his right and desperately trying to avoid eye contact. Clough, leaning in, even gets in a brilliantly condescending “good lad”.

“Leeds had to get someone who was slightly special,” he explains. “Now, I don’t want to sound blase or conceited …”

A small clip of the famous Brian Clough and Don Revie interview from 1974, shortly after Clough was sacked by Leeds. Riveting stuff that you just wouldn’t see these days. #lufc #lufc100 @TheSquareBall @TalkingShutt @FollowMeAndLUFC @Waccoe1919 pic.twitter.com/KDwWgWNIWK

— Stu’s Football Flashbacks (@stusfootyflash) December 1, 2019

Where did he get all that unshakeable braggadocio? Middlesbrough, initially. Clough scored 197 goals for his hometown club in 213 league games. For Sunderland, it was 54 in 61 before the knee injury that cut short his playing career, aged 27.

Ayresome Park is now a housing estate with streets named The Midfield and The Turnstile and various sculptures positioned strategically as reminders of the past. On the penalty spot, there is a bronze ball. For the centre spot, it is a pair of football boots.

“When I open my curtains in the morning, I can see the penalty spot,” says Nichols, who bought the first plot in 1997. “Where my front room is, the crowd would have been standing near the corner flag on what used to be the old East Stand, or ‘Bob End’, terrace.

“I often think about it. Every time I look out the window, it’s amazing to think I can see where a legend such as Brian Clough scored so many of his goals.”

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Scene Four: Nottingham

“The River Trent is lovely. I know, because I have walked on it for 18 years.”

There are two statues in Nottingham city centre that double up as tourist attractions. One is Robin Hood, the other is Clough. You will have to work out which attracts more visitors. But here’s a clue: he was known to refer to himself as Old Big ‘Ead.

His statue is located just off the Old Market Square, hands clasped above his head, at the first official Speakers’ Corner outside London. It is about 25 minutes’ walk to the City Ground and, if you want precise directions, maybe Jose Mourinho is your man.

As a boy, Mourinho was so enthralled by Forest’s glory years — the shiny Garibaldi-red shirts, white shorts, three Adidas stripes — that when he was covering matches at Euro ’96 he took a train to Nottingham to see the ground where Clough had worked his magic.

“I was 16 when they won the European Cup in 1979 and 17 the following year when they did it again,” Mourinho explains in the foreword to I Believe In Miracles, the book that accompanied the 2015 film about those wild, eccentric years beside the River Trent.

“It was a lot different back then and, growing up in Portugal, the only live matches involving English teams were the FA Cup finals and if they were involved in the European Cup finals. Even so, I knew all about this team. I knew who Brian Clough was, what he did for that team and the size of the achievement. I knew their manager stood out even in a generation when there were so many greats of his profession.”

So Mourinho got off at Nottingham railway station, walked into the city centre, then doubled back towards the ground, through the underpass into the Meadows estate, past the Poets Corner — a pub where, as an away fan, you might get cornered but there is not a huge amount of poetry — and all the way towards Trent Bridge.

Mourinho was a virtual unknown at the time, working for Bobby Robson in a backroom role at Barcelona. As such, nobody knew him as the Special One back then – and he was completely unrecognised.

“I walked all the way and when I saw the stadium I thought, ‘Are you kidding me — this club won the European Cup? Twice?’. It was a nice stadium and a nice city, but it was a small place. You go to Manchester United, or Milan, or Madrid and you can smell the history. You go to Nottingham and this small ground — and these guys won two European Cups?”

And the rest, Jose. Clough’s haul included a European Super Cup win over Barcelona, nine Wembley finals yielding six trophies (plus an FA Charity Shield), a 42-match unbeaten league run (a record that stood for 25 years) and so many other highlights that, drawing 0-0 in one game against Manchester United, the fans behind his dugout rather ungratefully started a slow hand-clap, expecting more.

Head across Trent Bridge now and, cosmetically, there have been a few changes. Not that many, though, and the fans are still waiting for the new Peter Taylor Stand that was announced five years ago.

The bulldozers were supposed to bring down the old structure in 2020 and the delays bring to mind the story from when the opposite stand was being put up 40 years earlier, on the proceeds of the European Cup wins. Clough upset the builders one day when he went over to say he liked the look of it, but, hey, could they bloody well get a move on?

These days, there is a museum at the stadium, where the items on display include some of Clough’s famous old green sweatshirts. There is a stand named after him. You can get your pre-match food at Cloughie’s Cobs on Pavilion Road. His name is built into the wall outside the Trent End. Even now he has gone, he is, in another sense, still there.

At one stage, Forest’s supporters even had a fanzine named after him.

Julie Pritchard, editor of Brian, started the publication in 1988, just before Clough took the team on a run of six Wembley finals in four seasons. She initially toyed with naming it ‘Sausages’ because Clough and Taylor liked to talk about a mythical side called the Nottingham Pork Butchers XI. But her decision was a popular one.

“It had to be something Clough-orientated because he was Nottingham Forest, in a way that I’m not sure anyone has ever been at any club, certainly in this country, to the same degree,” she says. “Every Forest fan over a certain age has gone on holiday and had the conversation: ‘Who do you support?’ … ‘Nottingham Forest’ … ‘Ah, Brian Clough!’. Even, for me, in China in 1992.”

When Forest play Fulham in their next home match, a three-minute video laden with Clough nostalgia will be shown on the big screens. This is the pre-match routine before every game at the City Ground and it ends with him staring into the camera and a famous quote — “I hope anybody’s not stupid enough to write us off” — that has felt, at times, very apt since the team’s return to England’s top division in 2022.

“A colossus,” is how Pritchard remembers him. “It’s not easy to explain just how good we had it in his time: going away from home, knowing in every game there was a high chance we’d win, and in style.

“I miss his wit, his compassion, his Christmas messages that were more regal than the royal ones.

“I don’t know how the master of keeping the game gloriously simple would have coped in the modern era. Or whether he would have lasted 44 days, let alone 18 years, under the current owner (Evangelos Marinakis) or previous one (Fawaz Al Hasawi). His unpredictability alone would make him stand out in the vanilla world of the Premier League.”

That unpredictability could scare off potential employers, meaning the Football Association never had the nerve to appoint him as England manager. Clough was box-office: charismatic, mercurial, a glint of superiority in his eye.

Not enough people know he was a founding member of the Anti-Nazi League, set up in 1977 to counter the growth of the National Front. ‘When you tread in something on the street you don’t talk to it, you scrape it off your shoe,” he said. “Nazism is just as much a disease as cholera and leprosy and it must be treated to stop it spreading.”

One of the original Chairman of the ANL, Nottingham Forest Manager, Brian Clough:

‘When you tread in something on the street you don’t talk to it, you scrape it off your shoe. Nazism is just as much a disease as cholera and leprosy and it must be treated to stop it spreading. pic.twitter.com/Jn3jvohlXn

— Pav Singh (@PavSingh84) April 9, 2024

It is undeniable Clough could talk himself into trouble at times. He had to apologise for comments he made about the Hillsborough disaster (Clough, like many, thought ticketless Liverpool fans were to blame) and it will never reflect well that earlier in the 1980s his frustrations with Justin Fashanu boiled over into a homophobic slur.

But the good far outweighed the bad and there is a line from Barry Davies, the BBC commentator, that has stood true throughout the three decades since Clough’s final league game in Nottingham. Clough had just emerged from the tunnel and, always keeping it interesting, hugged a policewoman before taking his seat. “An embrace for the law on his last home appearance,” said Davies. “The man with the green sweater. Whatever his failings, whatever his foibles, he’s been a power of good for the game of football.”

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It was stomach cancer in the end that took Clough’s life on September 20, 2004. Nigel was the manager at Burton Albion at the time and his father was a regular at matches. “I didn’t really have to go to him for advice too often,” says Nigel, with a rueful smile. “Advice was given anyway, without me seeking it too much.”

But Clough, you knew, was immensely proud of the player he used to call “the number nine.” He had Barbara and “the bairns” and he doted on his grandchildren. “It’s funny,” says Nigel, “he always had affection for the north east, having been brought up there, but his home was in the Midlands once he came down. He was very happy, very settled.”

And it is some legacy: two European Cups, three statues and so much reverence that at one point, there was talk of renaming East Midlands Airport as the Brian Clough International.

“We all remember Clough’s best quotes,” Mourinho concluded. “He had all that self-esteem and big self-belief. He had this super profile in front of the television cameras. And then ‘ping, ping, ping’ — he starts taking aim.

“History cannot delete what he and Nottingham Forest did — their results, the cups, the achievements, absolutely unbelievable achievements. I have huge respect for what they did. And I will tell you something else. I think if Brian Clough was around today, we would get on.”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Samuel Richardson)