C
elebrated quote-fountain
Oscar Wilde had a much-
repeated, typically callous
line about how losing one
parent could be regarded as
misfortune, but losing both
resembles carelessness.
Conversely, while winning
the league once with an
under-heralded never-before-
champion club could only be
regarded by the harshest
critic as somewhat fortuitous,
to repeat the process with
another lesser light might resemble genius.
Before Brian Clough, only two men had
led two different clubs to be champions of
England, both way back in the day. Even
since, in an era of managerial movements
between superclubs, only Kenny Dalglish has
been able to join them.
What worked for Clough was an incendiary
combination of ego, ambition, daring, charm,
chutzpah, motivation, fear, friendship and
loyalty. And it started with personal tragedy...“I constantly doubt my ability to manage.
I think I’m right but I’m not infallible”Psychiatrists describe alcoholics and addicts
as having the apparently conflicting mental
conditions of high ego and low self-esteem;
Clough fits the pattern. That he carefully
constructed his image is undeniable – this is,
after all, the man who said, “I wouldn’t say
I was the best manager in the business, but
I was in the top one.”
What’s less well-documented, because it’s
a much tougher subject, is that Clough was
frequently racked with self-doubt. As he told
The Observer shortly after conquering Europe
in 1979, “I’m conceited on certain aspects of
life, but with others I’m totally embarrassed.
All of us have certain areas of our lives and
characters that we’re uncomfortable with.”
His former team-mate Alan Peacock said
of Clough that “when he scored he was like
a man on drugs – he just lived for that”. And
Brian Howard Clough scored a lot. Born in
Middlesbrough in 1935, he netted 204 in 222
matches for his hometown Second Division
outfit. He also shot his mouth off, criticising
underachieving colleagues and managers,
cultivating local journalists – the beginning
of a long career of media symbiosis – and
regularly handing in transfer requests. When
one was finally accepted, he switched to
local divisional rivals Sunderland and scored
62 goals in 71 games.
On Boxing Day 1962, on a freezing Roker
Park pitch, Clough collided with the opposing
goalkeeper and ruptured medial and cruciate
ligaments in one knee. He fought desperately
for a couple of years to return – even making
three further appearances and scoring one
last goal – but back then, such injuries were
a career death sentence and he was forced
to hang up his boots.
“I suddenly knew the meaning of the word
desolation,” sighed Clough. “Life had seemed
so good and so promising – suddenly, I had
nothing but worries.”Now the supply of his favourite drug was
savagely cut off, facing the football equivalent
of cold turkey or delirium tremens, Clough’s
drinking took off. “I went berserk for a time,”
he said. “I drank heavily.”
He also had an immense fear of financial
insecurity. A lifelong socialist, he’d learned
from his childhood that there was no magic
money tree. His dad Joe was a sugar-boiler at
a sweet factory; his mum Sally looked after
the eight of her nine children who’d survived
infancy (Brian was the sixth).
Clough flunked the 11-plus exam, which
effectively divided the country’s children into
white-collar office workers and blue-collar
labourers, then failed an ICI apprenticeship.
“I was finished,” he said. “An ex-footballer
who knew how to do nothing other than play
football.” If he could no longer do that, he’d
have to fulfil the second half of the bellicose
rule from George Bernard Shaw’s Nietzsche-
influenced play Man and Superman: “Those
who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
Coaching Sunderland’s youth team, Clough
attended an FA course under long-ball guru
Charles Hughes, ignored most of it – he later
claimed his fellow class-mates learned more
from him than Hughes – and replaced tedious
pitch-lapping with some short-sided games,
prioritising finesse above fitness. The starlets
reached the semi-finals of the 1965 FA YouthCup, but at the end of the season Clough was
released from his duties.
He was 30 years old, unemployed, perhaps
unemployable, with a second child (Nigel) on
the way. Small wonder he seized his chance
when it came.“People said you could drop off the end of
the world there. Sometimes I wished I had”Hartlepool is few people’s idea of glamour:
a hard-working fishing port, scraping a living
from the fierce North Sea, with a football club
most famous as a punchline.
Founded in 1908 as Hartlepools United –
the plurality, dropped in 1968, reflecting the
combination of the port and the railway-
centred new town – the club settled at wind-
lashed Victoria Park, which promptly had its
main stand bombed by a German Zeppelin
in 1916. A supposedly temporary wooden
replacement was still in situ 70 years later.
Nor was there much progress on the pitch
for Pools. Never promoted in their history,
in the five campaigns ending to 1964 they
had finished 92nd, 91st, 90th, 92nd and 91st
in the Football League.
In October 1965, Clough was named their
eighth manager in the space of eight years –
“They change them like some people change
their underpants” – and the Football League’sAbove Clough
the player was
a goal-hungry
striker for both
Middlesbrough
and SunderlandCLOUGH
62 June 2022 FourFourTwo