He said I looked like a girl and needed a haircut!
He was Brian Clough’s go-to midfielder but it wasn’t the best of starts when John McGovern first met the legendary boss
BOXING DAY, 1962. A 13-year-old boy uses his pocket money to take a train from Hartlepool and travels along the North Sea coastline to Seaburn. From there he dashes to Roker Park and scuffles for space at the Fulwell End to watch Sunderland lose 1-0 to Bury. As he leaves early to catch his train home, the only thing the long-haired lad can think about is the sickening leg injury suffered by Sunderland’s star striker. OCTOBER, 1965. Hartlepools United reserves finish training and are told to stand in a line to meet the club’s new manager. It is the Sunderland striker, forced to retire having damaged his cruciate ligament nearly three years earlier.
He greets all of the players warmly before reaching a 15- year- old trialist. ‘Stand up straight, get your shoulders back and get your hair cut — you look like a girl,’ he orders. John McGovern, a skinny Mick Jagger wannabe, has just met Brian Clough for the first time.
Clough and McGovern were to prove a winning match. Over the next 17 years they would share four clubs, two European Cups, lifted by McGovern as Nottingham Forest captain, two First Division titles and two League Cups.
Tomorrow, two of their former teams, Hartlepool and Derby County, meet for the first time in more than 30 years in the FA Cup third round.
Hartlepool’s Victoria Park will play host, the scene of where it all began for the decorated duo. McGovern, who moved to Hartlepool from Montrose when he was seven and is widely regarded as one of the finest Scottish players never to win a cap for his country, recalls: ‘I went home and told my mum: “I ain’t going back there, the bogeyman has arrived.”’ The bogeyman, however, had a wise man in his ear — assistant Peter Taylor.
‘When Taylor saw me play he said to Clough: “Lock the doors and don’t open them until we’ve signed the skinny kid at outside right,”’ says McGovern, now 66. Come May, they wanted to make him the youngest player in the club’s history.
In the headmaster’s office of the Henry Smith Grammar School, a 16-year- old McGovern — already captain of the cricket and rugby teams — asked Mr Georgson for permission to play.
During an hour-long lecture, the terrified teen was told: ‘ It is detrimental to your education that you should even consider playing football.’ Mr Georgson refused. Clough intervened. McGovern played.
Hartlepools, as they were named until 1968, were in Division Four. They had little money and Clough quipped: ‘I don’t fancy the place.’
Rebuilding was needed and, concerned about the welfare of fans in Victoria Park’s Rink End, he charmed a l ocal builder i nto donating a truckload of corrugated asbestos for a new roof.
‘Instead of training, we spent an entire morning unloading it,’ laughs McGovern. ‘My mum was shocked when I couldn’t lift my arms that night. That was Cloughy. Someone had been generous and he used the players to provide the labour, just to stop the fans getting wet.
‘He used to take me around the social clubs as well. He wanted to convince folk that, after working hard all week, they could come to the game and enjoy it. From then I knew he was different. I’d never met anyone like him. I still haven’t.’
Clough and Taylor left for Second Division Derby in 1967. They wanted McGovern.
‘The Hartlepools manager, Angus McLean, used to call me Cloughy’s blue- eyed boy and bullied me to such an extent I was being sick on the pitch before games, so I put in a transfer request,’ says McGovern.
He started in the reserves. Taylor, though, was receiving bad reports.
McGovern protested: ‘I’m not playing poorly, I’m just not getting the ball out wide.’ Taylor suggested a move to the middle of the park and so it was that a two-time European Cup-winning midfielder emerged.
‘I went in the team alongside Dave Mackay. Bloody hell, I thought I was a footballer until I saw him play!’ says McGovern. ‘But because I could pass with both feet, got stuck in and had “three lungs”, I stayed in and we won the Second Division.
‘ I’d gone from the Fourth to First Division. The players in my scrapbook, the likes of Jimmy Greaves, I’d now be playing against.’
But McGovern was making a name for himself. All the while, though, he had kept his long hair.
One day, Clough asked him: ‘Would you like to play like George Best?’ McGovern nodded. ‘Well, when you can play like him, you can wear your hair like him,’ came the response.
Eventually, McGovern’s partner, Ann, cut his hair. But he wasn’t done there. ‘I went from shoulder-length to a short number-two crop. I bought some Dr Martens boots, sprayed them gold and wore braces with my club suit,’ he says.
‘We were playing at Coventry and having a look at the pitch before kickoff,’ he says. ‘A Status Quo number came on. I picked up my air guitar and started boogieing. ‘I turned around and saw Cloughy. S***. He stared at me, said: “You better play well today.”’ Derby won 1-0. McGovern was man-of-the-match.
Within three years of signing, he was a First Division champion. They beat Liverpool 1-0 in their last game with McGovern the scorer.
As he walked off the pitch, Clough said to him: ‘Don’t think you’ve done anything more than anyone else.’ It was a typical ploy to ground his stars.
Still needing Leeds to lose at Wolves, and Liverpool not to win at Arsenal, Derby jetted off to Mallorca. Taylor fixed up a telephone line to Madrid. The news came through that Leeds had lost. Then a crackle. Then silence. Taylor turned to the players and declared: ‘I think... I think he said we’ve won the league.’
McGovern says: ‘We went to bed and did not know. Next morning the place was packed with photographers. We knew we were champions.’
Clough quit Derby after a fallout with the board and, after a spell at Brighton, took over at Leeds.
Inevitably, McGovern followed, but Clough’s infamous 44-day reign was beginning to unravel.
‘Certain players gave me hospital balls and tried to make me look bad,’ says McGovern. ‘I will never forgive them. It was disgraceful.
‘Three years later, myself and Cloughy walked back into Elland Road with Forest, wearing a European Cup winner’s tie.’ They did so again a year later. ‘Sometimes, in the end, the good guy wins,’ smiles McGovern.