TAMING THE BEAST A FOUR-POINT PLAN
Frank Clark, who managed Stuart ‘Psycho’ Pearce at Nottingham Forest,
explains how to handle a hard man
“Stuart was a young man when he came to Forest, not long out of non-league football and having spent only a relatively short time at Coventry. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Brian Clough had a little bit of work to do with him when he first arrived. Brian taught him a lot about his tackling and his approach to the game. When Stuart first came he was a little... unsophisticated, shall we say. He would fly into challenges without caring much about where the ball went. By the time I took over [in 1993] he was one of the best tacklers in English football. He would come away with the ball rather than seeing it fly into the stands.” “As a manager it was fantastic having Stuart on the pitch, because his presencecould be enough to make a team change their tactics or a player change the way he played. There were a few wingers who didn’t fancy it and would do whatever they could to ensure they didn’t have to come face-to-face with Stuart. That’s the same if any of your defenders have that kind of reputation – but sometimes Stuart’s was enough for a team to change the way they would try to go about beating us.” “Very often, your toughest player has fantastic leadership qualities, and as a manager you want them leading from the front. There are two particular performances that stick in the mind with Stuart when I was Forest boss. One was the away leg of our UEFA Cup quarter-final against Bayern Munich [in March 1996], when he played despite having a bad shin injury that had become infected. The second was a game we won to seal promotion back to the Premier League [in 1994] against Peterborough. He was utterly magnificent in both and set the tone for the entire side.”