Clough a hero in a different age

In Sport, people are rarely canonised by virtue of their feats alone. Much of old sport becomes, after a time, nothing more than statistics.

The heroes of the hour are just that and are ultimately forgotten about. Sport is simply too vast, it eats too much of our attention to allow us to posthumously appreciate all of the brilliant moments, the great people. Those that we separate and freeze as icons are often those with the strongest personalities.

Channel 4's Football Stories last week initiated the lionisation of Brian Clough. Judged against the now terminally homogenised climate of English football, Cloughie's legacy seems both preposterous and valuable.

He was a jingoistic bully, an egomaniac and, in his latter years, a man who was startlingly out of touch with his environment. But he also presented, more zealously than most, the ideal of football manager as town saviour, as patriarch to an entire community.

In the past decade, English soccer has all but erased the decades of staunchly workingclass tradition. Such history and the oft-peddled image of football growing up from the mines have become quaint and hard to reconcile with today's TV product.

Clough finished at Nottingham Forest in 1993, with the Premiership in its infancy and the picture of his famous last stand, when the team was relegated after losing the last match of the season clearly illustrate a man utterly lost. He looks like a man who can no longer recognise his own child.

The Nottingham crowd famously gave him a prolonged ovation after the final whistle and the footage looks, in retrospect, like mass support therapy. Clough was at the time in the throes of an alcoholic binge and the perennial flowering of gin blossoms on his face prompted a series of brash comedic sketches and many questioning comments.

It was clear that Clough was being retired that afternoon, regardless of whether he wanted to stay or not. He was a man out of time and after he gave his last interview in the tunnel afterwards, the man from the BBC said, with perfect Noel Coward delivery: "It has been a pleasure knowing you, sir."

Clough's managerial accomplishments do make for very distinguished statistics but had he been a milder man, had he been less of a charismatic curmudgeon, then the chances are his achievements would be rarely dwelt upon. But Football Stories laid out the case that Clough was certainly the best manager to never lead England and, in the places he worked, was nothing less than a folk hero.

When Clough was at Derby, which he led to the old first division title in 1974, production in the local Rolls Royce factory rose by 10 per cent on afternoons when the team won.

"What he wanted was a decent community," said Michael Foot, who testified that Clough was one the most ardent socialists he ever met. This was not an opinion that Ole Big 'Ead was inclined to contradict and he flirted with the idea of becoming a Labour candidate in the mid-1970s.

But football was his obsession and his unorthodox methods and sheer force of personality made for fireworks. Tactics, allegedly, were not his concern and he basically just instructed his teams to win. He often made them drink on the nights before games to ensure they'd sleep well. His pregame talks sometimes consisted of songs. He bellowed his way through the season, as file footage shows.

"For missin' that, you should be shot. Woooh, it's crap. Wooh, that's bloody rubbish."

When he replaced his nemesis, Don Revie, at Leeds, he told the assembled squad - most of whom were internationals - that they should bin their previous championship medals because they had cheated to acquire them. He lasted 44 days at the club.

On-field ill discipline repulsed him. But then, he had many dislikes, including foreigners. Singling out the French for particular disdain, he also admitted that he "didn't like the Germans either cos they shot me Dad in the war".

All his great triumphs were back-boned by Peter Taylor, his great friend and co-conspirator from the early days at Hartlepool through to Derby and Nottingham Forest.

"He said: `you won't laugh so much now. And I didn't'," reminisced Clough about the time his friend finally left. Taylor wanted to try his hand at management but when he returned to Derby and poached John Robertson from Nottingham Forest, Clough vowed to never speak to Taylor again.

"I have no doubt that Clough loved Taylor, he really did," said Martin O'Neill.

Clough did turn up for his friend's funeral and the general consensus is that subsequent grief triggered off his drinking.

His reputation all but unravelled in his declining years, with the Nottingham Forest club director Chris Wooton publicly denouncing his manager as a drunk shortly after Clough was famously seen thumping fans who had invaded the pitch.

Even after he retired, he was embarrassed by allegations of financial misdemeanours over the transfer of Teddy Sheringham. The matter was never pursued because of the precarious state of his health. It was hard to gauge how many of the interviewees genuinely liked Clough. But the respect in which they held his passion for the game was evident. After Celtic won the Scottish Premier League this year, Clough was asked if Martin O'Neill could ever become as great a manager as he had been.

"Now you're being silly," deadpanned Clough, and he didn't laugh. It was apparent that he was serious. And maybe in a sense he had a right to be. What he achieved - success in backwater places like Derby, Brighton, Hartlepool, even Nottingham - cannot happen in English soccer again without huge financial backing. Clough did it through his peculiarly English eccentricity.

This documentary was essentially a tribute and there is a sense that the establishment wants to ordain Clough now that it is safe to do so. His reputation is assured and his odd little worldview will be presented as something worth cherishing, similar to the stoicism of Shankly or the canny wisdom of Matt Busby.