50 YEARS SINCE BRIAN CLOUGH APPOINTMENT
However, on January 6, 1975, fifty years ago today, a board conscious of the need for “a breath of fresh air” approved
a deal that brought the celebrity manager to the banks of the River Trent. What they got, and what one newspaper
foresaw in its headline, was a “hurricane” of a personality that would turn a second division team into a European
powerhouse in four years. At the Reds when Clough arrived, Martin O’Neill was one of five players who would later
win promotion to the top flight two years later, the English championship twelve months later, and the first of back-
to-back European Cups in 1979.
“He would also say that we were a two-bit second division club going nowhere until he arrived. All of those things
may or may not be true, but they probably were.”
Clough’s first big trophy as a manager was won in Derby, just 16 miles away, three years prior, when he led the Rams
to their first English championship in 1972.
And although he led Derby to a match against Juventus in the European Cup semi-finals—a contentious two-leg
match that the Rams lost—a falling out with the board caused him to leave in 1973.
After 32 games, he left Brighton & Hove Albion, who were struggling in the third division at the time, to head Leeds
United for an infamous 44-day reign. There, he introduced himself to a team that had just won the English title by
telling them to throw their medals.It showed that Clough could be as caustic as he was charming.
In the decades that have followed, he was seen as the greatest manager England never had –, external interviewing
for the job in 1977 and 1982 – and it is widely thought that the Football Association saw Clough as too much of an
outspoken figure to hold the job.
Some at Forest were nervous for the same reasons when they went after him as a replacement for Allan Brown – who
was sacked following a 2-0 home defeat by city rivals Notts County, which left the Reds 13th in the second tier at the
start of 1975.
“Brian Clough was a very controversial figure and a lot of the committee didn’t want him to come,” said former
Forest chairman Brian Appleby during an interview with BBC Sport before he passed away in 2021.
“I think they were frightened of what would happen.
“My attitude was simply that we can’t be in any worse position than we are now, and we needed a breath of fresh air.
And that’s exactly what Brian Clough was.”
Nottingham’s Football Post newspaper echoed those very words in an article published after Clough oversaw his first
win – which was to knock Tottenham out of the FA Cup in a third-round replay at White Hart Lane.
“It was not so much a breath of fresh air that swept the corridors of the City Ground this week – more like a
hurricane,” the piece stated in its opening line.
“A wind of change has come over the club and within an hour of his arrival, Brian Clough made more impact than
most managers achieve in a lifetime.”
O’Neill says he remembers first meeting Clough “as clear as daylight” having been sat with team-mates in the
changing rooms at the City Ground on the day of the new manager’s arrival.
While the former midfielder readily admits that many in that changing room would have been relative unknowns to
the new boss, the man himself was among the most famous in Britain.
His personality was known well beyond the terraces, as his wit and panache for entertaining as a talkshow guest
made him a media darling whose catalogue of memorable quotes – be it about grass in the sky or shutting up to show
more football – remain part of football’s lexicon to this day.
“In that time there were very few television stations around, but he was a celebrity,” O’Neill said.
“He was appearing on Michael Parkinson’s chat show, and I might be exaggerating, but it seemed like every six
weeks. He was big news. What he had was this great charisma.”
Brian Clough’s first win as Nottingham Forest manager came in an FA Cup replay at Tottenham just two days after his arrival
For one 18-year-old Forest fan at the time, Clough’s January arrival was greeted as a “late Christmas present”.
William Heath is a lifelong Reds supporter who is now 68 and lives and works in Mijas, on the southern coast of
Spain, where he makes up part of the self-styled and unofficial Calahonda Forest Supporters Club.
When Clough started at Forest, Heath was an apprentice electrician in Nottingham trying to forge a career during
the ‘three-day working week’ – a measure brought in by the government of the time to try to conserve dwindling fuel
supplies in the country.
“The year before Clough joined Forest was pretty bleak,” Heath told BBC Sport.
“There were miners’ strikes, the country was in a three-day week and with me being a second-year apprentice, I
wondered if there was any future in my job.
“It was a pretty dull year as far as looking at your future was concerned.”
While at Leeds, Clough only seemed to add to that gloom as he managed to sign Forest striker Duncan McKenzie –
who was seen as one of the few bright sparks of the 1973-74 season after scoring 26 goals.
“Clough, having taken our best player to Leeds, was not my favourite person in the world at that time,” Heath
recalled.
“But it was like a late Christmas present. I even remember getting a diary for Christmas and thinking I will never
write in this, and the first thing I did write was on the 6th of January that Brian Clough is the new manager of Nottingham Forest with extremely high expectations of what was going to happen.”
O’Neill, whose first season with Forest ended with relegation from the top flight in 1972, recalls the same sense of
anticipation within the dressing room.
“We felt that something was going to happen when he arrived at the football club,” said O’Neill, a man who would go
on to manage Leicester City, Celtic, Aston Villa, Sunderland and the Republic of Ireland before a brief spell as Forest
boss in 2019.
“He arrived on a dark and dismal morning way back in January 1975, and for a number of players in the dressing
room – younger players like myself, Tony Woodcock, Viv Anderson, John Robertson and Ian Bowyer – he changed
our lives, absolutely.”
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