Football: Forever a hero in the hearts of Forest's faithful: The city of Nottingham paid its respects yesterday to a manager who became a monument. Richard Williams reports

THEY LIKE taking down monuments in Nottingham. The medieval almshouses on Maid Marian Way, bulldozed to make space for a bunch of concrete blocks which became known as the ugliest thoroughfare in Europe. The Black Boy, a fine city centre coaching inn, razed to provide the setting for a supermarket. Parr's Tree, the Trent Bridge landmark removed when the architects started talking about executive boxes. And now Brian Clough.

Nobody ever asks the people about these things, of course. And yesterday the people made it clear how they felt about the departure of the People's Choice. Down Pavilion Road they came, old men who could remember how the legendary Wally Ardron's goals got Forest out of the Third Division South in 1951, side by side with children unborn when Clough brought the European Cup to Nottingham in 1979 and 1980. In they strolled, the faithful fans and the favourite sons - like Larry Lloyd, the former Forest centre- half, a publican who could double as his own bouncer and who said this week that 'I've only got to look at my collection of medals to see what Brian Clough did for me.' That is what the whole city was saying yesterday.

When the game was up, with 10 minutes to go, Cloughie came out of the dugout and leaned against the wall, arms folded across the green sweatshirt, watching impassively as the lights went out on Nottingham Forest's 15 years in the top flight. It was ending in the worst kind of anti-climax, but there was nothing he could do to change it. In truth, there has been nothing he could do all season. Yesterday his legacy was visible only after the final whistle, when the faithful Trent End stayed behind en masse, not wanting to believe it was over, politely waiting for one last salute from the man who gave them days and nights to remember, and tried to stop them swearing and invading the pitch.

They got their reward. Clough reappeared after half an hour, to be engulfed in a sea of red and white. He kissed as many policemen, shook as many hands and patted as many heads as he could, and was still waving as he disappeared back down the tunnel, borne away by anxious minders.

It is wrong to assume, as many commentators did last week, that Nottingham Forest was a nothing club before Clough's arrival in January 1975. True, they were anchored in the lower reaches of the old Second Division, with home gates down to a sullen and mutinous hard core of 12,000. But, as there had been at Derby, there was a tradition to draw on - a tradition of fast, precise, close- passing football embodied in two fine post-war sides, both associated with managers of vision. Billy Walker's fluent team of the late Fifties took the FA Cup in 1959 after Walker had been able to select the same 11 players through all nine ties. Johnny Carey's delicate entertainers of 1966-67, the fine team of Baker, Hennessey, Grummitt, Newton and Storey-Moore, finished runners-up in Manchester United's last championship season, were one match away from another Cup final and could have done more had they not been broken up and sold off by a myopic committee. So Cloughie was not the first to bring attractive, idealistic football to the City Ground, and there is no reason to suppose that he will be the last.

Nor the last to suffer from the myopia of committee men. Of course they should have eased his parting much earlier. Out in the car park before yesterday's game, there was no agreement about exactly when the termination should have been arranged. After the 1991 Cup Final? Last Christmas? There is no monopoly of wisdom in these matters, and the man least likely to identify the time to go is the one at the centre of the affair, tugged by unfinished business and unfulfilled yearnings. And perhaps, in Clough's case, by the suspicion that full-time grandfatherhood will be no substitute for the only life he has ever known.

In the morning, his family had issued a statement regretting the way a planned retirement had been turned into a enforced resignation. But they, above all, should know that there are no happy endings in football management. If you are lucky, you win a few things. And then, eventually, you lose.

Clough's departure is sad in all sorts of ways, but it is not the end of the world, even for Nottingham. Across the road at Trent Bridge yesterday, Derek Randall was patrolling the covers in the first match of a new season. He is 42 years old, and made his debut for Nottinghamshire when Clough and Taylor were still at the Baseball Ground. Now when he stops, the place really will be different.

(Photograph omitted)