Duncan Hamilton - Provided You Don’t Kiss Me - 20 Years with Brian Clough

Clough got some things horribly wrong. His fear that live TV would soon kill football was quickly discredited. His criticism of successive England managers stemmed from the suppurating wounds that the Football Association inflicted on him. No one, he felt, could do a better job with England than the face he saw every morning in the shaving mirror. His criticism of players and other managers was frequently unfair.

But another thing about him, and a major reason to admire the man, was his refreshing philosophy about how the game ought to be approached. Style mattered, and Clough fell into the category of high-minded aesthetician. It wasn’t enough to win – he wanted to win playing beautiful football. He wanted the ball passed elegantly, as if it were on a thread, from player to player, preferring creative intuition to brute force. He demanded style as well as discipline.

As Clough saw it, teams who played the long ball were horned devils. He said to me: ‘Any idiot can coach a group of players to whack the ball as hard and as high as possible, and then gallop after it. Give me time, and I could train a monkey to do that and stick it in the circus. What pleasure does anyone get watching a side like that? You may as well go plane spotting at Heathrow –’ cos you’d find yourself staring at the sky all the time, and then you’d go home with a stiff neck.’ When he talked that way, his eyes became flinty, and the skin around his mouth tightened into a snarl. He would jab out his right hand, like a southpaw sparring in the gym.

The game, Clough argued idealistically, was simple. He would lay a towel on the floor of the dressing room and place a ball at the centre of it, striving to make a mental symbol of it take hold in a player’s mind. ‘This ball is your best friend,’ he would say. ‘Love it, caress it.’ He preached the simplicity of football with the passion of a TV evangelist. The game, he said, is ‘the most straightforward on God’s earth – beautiful grass, a ball, a defined space in which to play it.’

Clough believed that everything in life was overcomplicated and that most coaches were guilty of overcomplicating football, as if it were ‘something like nuclear physics and Einstein had written a book about it’. A pained expression crossed his face whenever he heard coaches talk about ‘systems’ or saw chalk lines scratched on the blackboard. He looked at ‘Subutteo men being pushed around a felt pitch’ with disgust. ‘Get the ball,’ he said. ‘Give it to your mate or try to go past someone. Score a goal. Make the people watching you feel as if there’s been some skill, some flair in what you’ve done.’

Near the end of what was to become his penultimate season in 1992, I was walking back from the training ground with him. We talked about football as entertainment. ‘You know why so many people queue up for hours to look at the Mona Lisa ?’ he asked, all ready to roll out his own answer. ‘’Cos it’s an attractive piece of work. It moves them. They feel the same way about a beautiful woman, like Marilyn Monroe. They feel the same way about a statue or a building. They even feel the same way about a sunrise. Now if we’re half as good-looking as a football team as Mona, Marilyn or a sunrise, then we might get one or two people prepared to come and see us every Saturday – even if it’s pissing down.’

No team, Clough believed, could claim to be ascetically superior if a streak of ill-discipline or a tendency to wantonly bend the rules ran through it. That, he said, is why he so ‘hated’ Revie’s Leeds.

On a Friday he had a habit of writing out his team sheet to the accompaniment of a Frank Sinatra record. A ‘gramophone player’ (he never referred to a ‘record’ or ‘tape deck’) sat on the low glass-fronted bookcase in his office. A drawing of Sinatra hung on the wall. He would sometimes spend a long time hunting for his reading glasses before beginning the painstaking process of putting down each name in large capital letters.

‘You know,’ he said one day, handing me the team sheet, ‘I’d love all of us to play football the way Frank Sinatra sings … all that richness in the sound, and every word perfect. How gorgeous would that be?’ His face glowed like a fire, and he began to sing along with Sinatra, always a word ahead of him, as if he needed to prove that he knew the lyrics. ‘ I ’ ve got you … under my skin …’ He rose from his chair, still singing, and began to pretend he was dancing with his wife. When the song finished, he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. He fell back into his chair, arms and legs splayed.

The smile looked as if it might stay on his face for ever. ‘Oh, that was good,’ he said. ‘Blow me, if only football could be that much fun …’

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