Alchemy (eBook)

2

’BORO DAYS

In Brian Clough’s eyes, his Mam kept the cleanest front step on their street. The street was Valley Road on Middlesbrough’s Grove Estate. He was closer to his mother than his father, a sugar boiler in a local sweet factory and a Middlesbrough FC season ticket holder. In the football-obsessed North East, Brian and his father stood on Ayresome Park’s terraces to worship Teesside heroes George Hardwick and Wilf Mannion, famed for his inimitable body swerve.

Sally (known as Sal) and Joe Clough instilled discipline in their children and a love of family life. Liver and onions was a teatime favourite, and there was no TV. Just a wireless, a gramophone and a piano. His Mam, who ruled the roost, spent many hours at the mangle, where Brian often helped her with the sheets.

Born in 1935, Brian was the fourth eldest of six boys along with two sisters. Typical of the day, the six brothers slept three-in-a-bed and were never cold. They all shared errands, while their parents scrimped and saved for the two-week family holiday to Blackpool every summer.

Academically, his brothers and sisters outperformed him. Indeed, a lifelong sense of inferiority arose from him failing his eleven-plus, the only sibling to do so. He cried on hearing the news. While they progressed to grammar school, he attended the local non-selective secondary. He left without any O- or A-levels, a fact he often mentioned in later life when boasting about the silverware he won as a football manager. In his mind, medals and trophies trumped paper qualifications.

Young Brian had a burning ambition to get picked for every team but struggled for selection at Marton Grove Secondary Modern. Resentment at being overlooked smouldered within him. It didn’t help that he was a small child who only spurted upwards from the age of 16 to reach 5ft 11in. His first love was cricket and the Yorkshire and England opening batsman Len Hutton. But his brothers’ preference for a different sport turned him into a football fanatic who drove himself to outcompete them. There were always pairs of football boots hanging behind their coalhouse door, and constant debate about who was the best player. For a time, four Clough brothers – Desmond, Billy, Joe and Brian – played for Saturday/Sunday afternoon village team Great Broughton in the Cleveland League. This left their mother with a large pile of muddy kit to wash every weekend. His other hobbies included collecting birds’ eggs, hunting out the best conkers, and climbing trees to pick apples and pears from the posher areas of Middlesbrough.1

Brian stood out with schoolteachers for his strong opinions on any given topic. Yet despite his cockiness and lack of academic prowess, the school made him head boy, an honour that brought him immense pride. The pleasing taste of authority, wearing a head boy’s cap and instructing his fellow pupils, stayed with him.

He left school at 15 to start an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner at the massive ICI plant in Billingham, racing there on a bike with dropped handlebars and narrow tyres. But his lack of dexterity meant he was unsuited to the work, and an underground tour of an anhydrite mine terrified him. ICI made him a junior clerk, but he was little more than a note-carrying messenger boy who progressed to filling out overtime sheets.2

A schoolteacher’s recommendation led Brian to start playing for Middlesbrough FC’s junior side. Yet no sooner had he progressed from amateur to professional at 17½ years old then he was called up for two years of national service in the Royal Air Force. Posted to RAF Watchet in Somerset, he could barely have been any further away from the North East, although test match cricket on the wireless provided a pleasant distraction. He played football for his station side on Wednesdays and Saturdays but bristled at never being picked for the RAF national team.3

On returning to Middlesbrough, it took far too long in Clough’s mind for him to become a first-team regular. He made his first-team debut against Barnsley on 17 September 1955 and scored four goals in nine games that season. What he termed his ‘Golden Year’ of 1956/57 made him a regular first-teamer and built his reputation as a prolific sharpshooter. He also gained notoriety as a bighead and a loudmouth. He just couldn’t refrain from calling out his fellow players’ shortcomings, particularly their frailties in defence. In Brian’s opinion, and he said so, there was no point in him banging in a hatful of goals up front if they were leaking them by the sack load at the back. Until they resolved the problem, he asserted, ’Boro would be perennial underachievers in the Second Division.

In a situation that would play out again at Sunderland, Clough made few friends in the Middlesbrough dressing room. After initial difficulties establishing himself in the first team, his goalscoring prowess cemented his position in ’Boro’s forward line. The one real friendship he did develop was with a goalkeeper seven years his senior who arrived on Teesside in 1955 after ten years at Coventry City, nine of them under the influential manager Harry Storer.

Born and brought up in Nottingham, Peter Taylor arrived at ’Boro with his young family and soon began to mentor Brian Clough. He couldn’t understand why his new younger acquaintance was not a regular in the first team given his goalscoring ability. ‘This fair-haired boy of 20 was the greatest player I had ever seen. I knew then that he must find success,’ Taylor said later. With a keen eye for football talent, developed under Storer, Taylor persuaded ’Boro manager Bob Dennison to give his cocky colleague more opportunities in the first team. Like most of his football-related judgements, Taylor was spot on.

Bachelor Clough and family man Taylor hung out together. The junior partner made regular visits to Taylor’s home, where they’d spend endless hours discussing football. They travelled top-deck on buses to take in countless matches around the North East. The pair talked tactics and honed a joint philosophy about how the game should be played, and how managers should manage.

Under Storer at Coventry, Taylor had studiously observed how his manager spotted and acquired talented players, often at bargain prices. And furthermore, he learned from him how to discern and exploit their best attributes. Storer was not a man to suffer fools in his dressing room or in the boardroom, and liked the game played hard.4 Taylor had become a disciple of Storer at Coventry, as Clough would become a disciple of Taylor at Middlesbrough. His new friend became his champion in the ’Boro dressing room. Beyond his footballing nous, Taylor also made Clough laugh with his observational dry wit. Furthermore, he told him to his face when he was wrong.

In 1957, Clough began to date a local girl he met at the Rea cafeteria, a regular player hangout for a milkshake and a chat. Brian considered himself the luckiest man in the world to have met her, and after two years of courting he married Barbara in 1959. Like Peter Taylor, she was able to keep him on an even keel, at least most of the time.

On the one hand, Clough had good reason to be cocky. His goalscoring record was phenomenal and the statistics spoke for themselves. In four consecutive seasons at Middlesbrough he scored more than forty goals. In the 1957/58 and 1958/59 seasons he was literally a goal-a-game striker, with stats of 42/42 and 43/43 games to goals respectively. Two of his goalscoring records still stand today, perhaps never to be surpassed. In total, he scored 251 league goals from 274 starts. Only three weeks before his life-defining injury, Clough had completed the fastest 250 goals in league football. Like his record in reaching 200 goals, it still stands. Among this goal frenzy, he scored eighteen hat-tricks at Middlesbrough and Sunderland. In addition to these, he scored four goals on five occasions at Middlesbrough, and once bagged five goals in a 9–0 hammering of Brighton at Ayresome Park in August 1958.

Clough was renowned as a fox in the 6-yard box, pouncing on any sniff of goal. He’d often pick up the ball in midfield, distribute it accurately to either wing, to dash forward into the open space for a quick return.5 The near post was his main bread and dripping.

There is one large caveat to these records, however. All Clough’s goals, bar one, were scored in the Second Division. The lingering question is why no First Division club bought him if he was that good, and why he won just two full England caps. He would have told you that it was due to the rank bad judgement of First Division managers and England team selectors. According to Clough, and some agreed, England played him in the wrong position or in the wrong formation. Others reckoned his lack of progression up the league and at international level had a lot to do with his oversized head and salty tongue.

As well as possessing an uncanny ability to score goals, he also excelled in rubbing up people the wrong way. In a notorious episode at Middlesbrough, for example, most of his teammates signed a round-robin requesting that the club withdraw the captaincy from him. Instead of shooting his mouth off, Clough shot a hat-trick in their next game to help sink Bristol Rovers 5-1. Manager Bob Dennison quipped that his players should repeat the round-robin if it was going to have that effect.

Doug Weatherall had attended a game at Carlisle and stayed the night in the town. He was supposed to cover a game at Workington the next day when his office called and instructed him to...