UNSUNG HERO
ROLE DAVID DOCHERTY TAKES A LOOK AT THE IMPORTANT NUMBER TWO… PLAYED BY BRIAN CLOUGH’S UNHERALDED
The true value of Peter Taylor
IN THE minds of many, Brian Clough was unquestionably THE manager of the 1970s. He won League Championships with both Derby County (1972) and Nottingham Forest (1978), two League Cups with Forest (1978, 1979) and, biggest of all, brought two European Cups (1979 and 1980) back to the City Ground.
The European Super Cup was also won in 1979 when they saw off Barcelona over two legs.
However, the vexed question remains – was all of that success actually down to Clough and his peculiar man-management techniques or should the real credit go to his trusty assistant Peter Taylor for his extraordinary talent-spotting skills?
That question is particularly relevant in the context of f football history because the fact is that Clough never again reached those giddy heights after he and Taylor split up in 1982.
That split soon became rancorous and acrimonious and caused Clough much soul-searching in his final years. Sheer stubbornness on both sides meant that he and his one-time buddy never reconciled their differences before Taylor’s death at the age of 62 in 1990.
Clough’s relationship with Taylor is usually described as a “partnership” but it was never that in the true sense because partnerships are about equality.
Whilst they may have picked the team together, Taylor was never Clough’s equal in terms of money and status and, at both Derby and Forest, Clough seemingly did the dirty on his “best mate” by accepting substantial pay increases without letting on.
Ultimately, money was to prove a major cause in their parting of the ways. There were, of course, a number of other contributory factors, not least Clough’s increasingly irrational behaviour.
It is well chronicled that Clough was brash, loud-mouthed, controversial and, frankly, insufferable at times
Inevitably, for someone who had such strong opinions on a variety of topics, television came a-courting. They saw him as a “natural” and gave him a huge platform to vent on everything from politics to Polish goalkeepers and he was conceited enough to take the bait (and the money).
Right from the off, Clough’s outspokenness polarised public opinion towards him. His regular absences due to his TV work also irked Taylor greatly as he was left to hold the fort so often that it led to him at one point requesting a cut of Clough’s television money.
In time, Clough would understatedly admit: “I thought it got out of hand a little bit.”
Taylor, who was by far the calmer of the two men, preferred to remain in the background and go about his work quietly outside the glare of the media spotlight. He himself said that his strength was in selecting and buying the right material.
He had more than a passing resemblance to the actor James Beck who played the spiv Private Walker in “Dad’s Army” and, like his doppelganger, he was not averse to doing a bit of wheeling and dealing to supplement his income. He had a wry sense of humour and enjoyed a bet.
He acted as the bridgehead between the players and the abrasive Clough, whose man-management skills did not stop short of bullying and physical and verbal abuse.
That may have been something that Clough picked up during his National Service days where humiliation and intimidation were the standard tools for “making a man of you”.
The two first became mates at Middlesbrough in the 1950s where Clough was a very promising striker (centre-forward in those days) and Taylor, the older man by nearly seven years, was a fairly average goalkeeper.
Despite their age gap, they soon found that they had much in common and they would spend many hours in Rea’s cafe near Middlesbrough’s then Ayresome Park ground discussing their ideas about how the game should be played.
Whilst Clough went on to play for England and bag a big-money move to Sunderland, Taylor left the club for Port Vale in 1961 and a year later joined Burton Albion, eventually being named manager in December 1962.
He enjoyed great success with the Brewers and took them to Southern League Cup glory as well as the higher echelons of the Southern League table.
When Clough was offered the managership of re-election specialists Hartlepools United in 1965, following his injury- enforced retirement, he picked up the phone to the man he had barely spoken to in the intervening four years and asked him to join him as his assistant.
Taylor was initially reluctant as it involved taking a substantial paycut but he let his heart rule his head and accepted. Clough was hired on a salary of £2,000 a year whilst Taylor was recruited for a weekly wage of £24.
Following two seasons of steady progress, in difficult circumstances with very little money to spend, the perennial strugglers climbed to a nose-bleeding eighth in the table.
That fact had not gone unnoticed and, after Taylor had asked their mutual friend Len Shackleton to put out feelers for something bigger and better, the duo took over the reins at Second Division strugglers Derby County in the summer of 1967.
Whilst Clough’s salary was hiked to £5,000 a year, Taylor was paid just half of that.
It was at Derby that Taylor’s gift for spotting footballers with either untapped potential or those who had lost their way in the game came to the fore.
Besides bringing his early protege John McGovern from Hartlepools, he was instrumental in the recruitment of the likes of Roy McFarland, Alan Hinton, Willie Carlin, John Robson (who played over 200 first team games straight from North East junior football before joining Aston Villa for £90,000) and later Archie Gemmill.
However, his greatest achievement at that time was in persuading Clough that they should bring the great Dave Mackay to the club from Tottenham Hotspur.
That Machiavellian masterstroke saw County race away with the Second Division title in 1970 and Mackay become only the second player from that division, after Stanley Matthews, to be voted Footballer of the Year.
The massively experienced world traveller Mackay would say later that Clough introduced him to a world of four-letter insults, slamming doors and even a hint of underlying physical violence.
Two seasons later the Rams were champions of the Football League. The club went on to reach the semi-final in their first tilt at the European Cup but Juventus denied them a place in the final which led to Clough famously accusing them of being “cheating bastards” after he saw their German player Helmut