Cloughie’s ace was always to make us believe we were the better team
IN what should have been a week building up to Saturday’s Champions League final, Sportsmail takes the opportunity to speak to some of the Scots who have lifted the most treasured trophy in European football. Today, IAN HERBERT speaks to Nottingham Forest skipper John McGovern, who won back-to-back finals under Brian Clough... but never won a Scotland cap. Here he recalls the second of those triumphs back in 1980 in a team packed with Scots.
The material worlds of John McGovern and Kevin Keegan could scarcely have been further apart when their paths collided in a european Cup final, precisely 40 years ago.
As Nottingham Forest faced hamburg, Keegan, part of the German team, was enjoying the £20,000 he’d earned from his foray into the music industry with the song Head Over Heels In Love. It made No 10 in the German charts, supplementing the cash he’d made from his lucrative Patrick boots deal, which he insisted on keeping, despite hamburg being tied up to adidas.
McGovern’s only musical venture had been in the Forest team’s
We’ve Got The Whole World In Our Hands single, recorded with Paper
Lace in 1978, which made neither royalties nor Top of the Pops. he and his team-mates had been offered a deal worth £500 apiece to wear adidas boots in the 1980 final — so long as at least eight players did so and that they actually won the game.
‘There was a £5,000 win bonus for the match,’ says McGovern. ‘There was no appearance money.’
They had Brian Clough in their corner, though, so it didn’t matter that their star striker Trevor Francis was missing and that Peter Shilton, their most crucial player on the night, sustained a calf injury in training a few days beforehand.
‘Brian Clough’s ace was that you went out feeling as good as or better than the opposition,’ reflects 70-year-old McGovern. ‘he gave you that confidence.’
Forest did a job on Keegan that night as they beat hamburg to become the first — and still the only — club to have won the european Cup more times than they have their domestic championship.
‘We were told not to speak to him beforehand’, says McGovern, relating how Clough had banned his players from even looking at the englishman in the Bernabeu tunnel, to ensure the then 29-year-old was ‘on edge’.
The exceptions to this rule were central defensive enforcers Larry Lloyd and Kenny Burns, told by Clough to intimidate Keegan by any means possible. Burns, chewing pink gum, flicked his denture at him in the tunnel and made a grotesque chewing gesture. Lloyd, who had played with Keegan at Liverpool, was more direct, informing Keegan that Burns would be ‘giving you a hiding’.
McGovern was just a few yards from Keegan when Burns first made good on Lloyd’s threat, 20 minutes or so into the game, before following it up with a few choice words about the curly perm that the englishman had left Liverpool with.
‘Kenny always had a brief explanation for the referee and a quick quip for the player,’ says McGovern. ‘Kevin drifted into midfield to avoid Kenny after a second challenge, which helped us a lot as he was less trouble to us there.’
Keegan joked with McGovern in that rarefied first half that Burns was clearly ‘not in a good mood’. ‘Cloughie’s told us we can’t have a drink with our wives after the game,’ McGovern replied. ‘They’re staying in a different hotel. even we won’t go near him.’
It was minutes before the first Burns hack at Keegan that John Robertson scored for Forest, jinking to defender Manny Kaltz’s right, picking up a one-two with Garry Birtles and firing a low shot to put Forest ahead. hamburg spent the next 70 minutes of football throwing the house at Forest
— to no avail. Keegan was so frustrated he pushed a linesman in frustration three minutes before the end, somehow avoiding dismissal. Forest’s endurance running left the players on their knees at the end. ‘I could barely lift the cup,’ says McGovern. The match — no classic — is perhaps best remembered for Shilton’s string of saves, though, for many, the then 30-year-old McGovern’s contribution eclipsed the lot. It had been the same when Forest beat Cologne in the 1979 european Cup semi-final. hamburg manager Gunter Netzer said of the Scot in commentary that night: ‘I don’t know who this player is but he has run the match from midfield.’
McGovern was frequently underestimated. he was diminutive in stature and, born with a muscle missing from his back, could not run fast.
‘It meant my left shoulder went across my body when I ran and it always was a handicap and something that limited me,’ he says. ‘But I decided that what I lacked in speed I would make up for in stamina. Nobody would run me into the ground, even if I did lack that pace, that extra yard. I was never the greatest player but I understood the game.’
That was food and drink to Clough, who did not have time for individualists. his relationship with Stan Bowles after signing him to Forest was wretched. Bowles did not even travel to Madrid. But he adored McGovern and signed him three times — for
Derby County, Leeds United and Forest.
‘his talents were not as obvious as (those of some)’ Clough said of McGovern, years later. ‘his immense physical and moral courage, his willingness to put in his lot whatever the circumstances, his total trustworthiness and reliability. his ability to play a pass.’
If there was a regret for Clough — and he was not inclined to harbour many — it was the terrible experience he exposed McGovern to at Leeds, by taking him there from Derby and then leaving him to it after 44 days.
The resentment felt around elland Road for Clough, a long-time critic of Leeds under Don Revie, was raw and McGovern, as one of his representatives, was a target.
‘I was booed when I ran out for my home debut,’ he relates. ‘Billy Bremner was suspended and, when he told me I was playing,
Clough said: “I don’t think you will get a good reception”. It was a nightmare. The players did not want me there. Some went as far as them letting the ball run out of play when I passed. I will never forgive them for that.
‘I was at the meeting where Clough walked out, after John Giles had spoken up against him. I couldn’t believe Brian didn’t challenge them. He left and never came back.’
Clough later observed that Leeds’ players and crowd had ‘humiliated’ McGovern but he had the ‘last laugh’ when they were reunited again at Forest, then still in Division Two.
After promotion to the top flight, Forest became the biggest challengers to Liverpool, though Bob Paisley’s players always wondered why McGovern and Co put up with Clough’s discipline. To them, it looked like rule by fear.
‘Well, there were rules,’ McGovern counters. ‘If you talked to the papers, you were fined, yes. You tucked your shirts in. But you can’t go out and perform to the best of your ability if you are scared. He’d tell me: “If Brady or Giles get a kick, then I kick you”. Which meant that Liam Brady of Arsenal or Giles of Leeds must not get a game.’
The football rules were sublimely uncomplicated, as McGovern recalls from a formative training session with Clough at Hartlepools (then still taking the plural form) in 1965.
‘He told me: “Go and get a ball and bring it back here now”,’ McGovern says.
‘Then, he told me: “Dribble the ball to the corner flag and back,” which I did.
‘Next he said: “Now do it without the ball”. I did that, too. “Tell me which was the easiest, with or without the ball?”, he then asked me. “Without it,” I told him. “So why don’t you try passing it on Saturday?”, he said. ‘I never forgot that.’
These experiences shape McGovern’s opinion on how Clough would view some of today’s midfielders and ‘ballplaying’ defenders. ‘Manchester City signed John Stones for £50million but he can’t play out for his life,’ he reflects. ‘And he’s not the only one. The number of goals lost from some of these players. Left and right and right and left across the penalty area, the ball goes now. Clough would not have had that.’
The post-match entertainment Clough insisted upon after Keegan and Co had been vanquished four decades ago was typically unconventional.
The squad returned to the isolated hulk of a hotel up in the
Sierra de Guadarrama, 40 miles from Madrid, which he had insisted on, leaving the wives and families down in the city. A few players sneaked out in the hotel manager’s son’s SEAT car, though the less recalcitrant group, including McGovern, played Connect 4 for much of the night. Cake was laid on.
When McGovern finally wrote an autobiography, eight years ago, Keegan provided the foreword and referenced the 1980 match. ‘John was at the heart of their play, keeping things ticking over,’ he reflected.
‘He simply didn’t have the physique you would normally associate with a footballer. But when you saw him play, all of that was pushed to one side. He supplemented the ability he had with sheer hard work. It was an honesty that all of us who played against him respected.’