SPECTATOR SPORT
Clough's the man
Frank Keating
A CITY chap said on the radio the other day that if British business was run by a gabble of Brian Cloughs then our manufac- turing would have long been showing a clean pair of heels to the Germans and Japs. Clough puts his latest goods in the shop window at Wembley next Saturday. In a quarter of a century of football management a successive string of his bespoke little sides has won everything else in Europe except the FA Cup. His hand- made teams have been a credit to a good game — unfailingly athletic and intelligent, energetically dirk-sharp, and as clean as a linesman's kneecap.
There is a paradox about Nottingham's manager and managed. While his teams are invariably sober with a small 's', short-back-and-sides, and refreshingly in the trim, Clough himself has spent much of his career pontificating piffle to the pop press and displaying on television all the exhibitionist ego of a hyperactive toddler. To be fair, he has tried to curb these headline hogging buffooneries of late just as he has, with Lenten determination and grit, resolved to dilute the vodka in his glass with much more Ashbourne water. Still, one zoomed-in glance of beady in- tensity from his bloodshot eye — often these days he looks like a Robert Newton auditioning for the part of that squiffy coxcomb, Pistol, in Henry V — and his troops are at attention, on guard, and twitchingly keen to play for him and please him. And us.
A crucial talent down this years has been Clough's knack of twigging the precise moment to change a winning side and, in fashioning a new one, how to leaven the blend between callow youth and old-hand maturity. Five of his Cup-final side next week were nowhere near the first team in August; in five matches in April they walloped in 20 goals.
`His secret is that no player feels too sure of himself or his place,' says Archie Gem- mill, former Forest captain, now reserve team coach. Another longtime stalwart, Ian Bowyer, warns affectionately, 'Never predict him. His invigorating basics may never alter, but you never know what to expect when you come in, win or lose — it might be a pat on the head for something you've cocked up but at which, at least, you tried; or a right rollicking for scruffily beginning something that, in the end, turned out brilliant.'
Also, Clough is a relaxed and trusting delegator. For years he allowed his late assistant, Peter Taylor, to take much of his kudos. Last week he came back from a short holiday in Tenerife — how relaxed can you get en route to Wembley? — and promptly suspended Gemmill for allowing the reserves to lose three matches out of four. I had half a dozen intensive years on the soccer beat in the 1970s, home and away with Cloughie, and found him as changeable as a weather-vane in spring one week engaging, comradely, overflow- ing with creative tension; a bracing tonic; next week, sullen, boorish, the-great-I-am with a black dog brooding at the end of his leash. But it's the bracing turbulence and (vodka) tonics, his passions for the game, that one cannot forget. I'd dearly love to be in on the final pep-talk to his young team at Wembley. The only one I have eavesdropped was at Southampton years ago. Everyone at attention, studs clattering on the concrete with anticipation. He tossed a ball at his captain and said, 'This is a football. Now just go out and play with it.'
They did; won 3-nil. Up the Forest. Well, May is the time for nuts.
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