Clough at Derby (the first time around)

Nigel Clough may find success at Derby County after 10 years of excellent work in the modest environment of Burton Albion but it is unlikely the entire football club will be obliged to spend half its time looking for a trip wire – or waiting for the next explosion.

It will not miss a heartbeat when the boss's Mercedes slams to a halt outside the ground. That was the effect of the Brian Clough era at the old Baseball Ground. No blood line in any corner of sport is so strong that it could ever begin to reproduce such a time. It stretched out into six mind-altering years between 1967 and '73.

He would know greater glory down the road in Nottingham and he would refine his act and his impact to almost surreal levels before they were deadened, finally and with irrevocable sadness and waste by the toll of drinking in his last few years, but Derby was the wild making of Brian Clough. He went there a young and urgent manager who had done impressive work deep in his own little corner of the world at Hartlepool. He left surrounded by fascination and great celebrity: abrasive, infuriating, but plugged, immovably, into a vein of the nation.

In Derby he first saw truly his own power to influence and intimidate all those around him and it had the heady effect of a long gulp of the finest brandy.

There at the Baseball Ground he grasped how he could push footballers to their limits while at the same time capturing the imagination of the wider football world.

They were mad and enchanted years and they separated their creator from the rest of football so profoundly it was soon clear he was engaged in a game that no one had ever encountered before. It had never been played with such a lack of inhibition in the minds of the players, the directors and the fans – and the establishment of the game – because maybe no one had ever been quite so consumed by the need to both succeed and expel the demons that came with a cruelly truncated playing career.

It means, we have to believe, that at least part of Nigel Clough's strategy will be the result of astute rummaging amid maybe the most complicated football legacy ever bequeathed by a father to a son.

Complicated, this is, in the uniqueness of the father's astonishing style and demeanour – and both the ferocity and anarchy of his ambition.

The father was hungry, and angry, in a way the son could never be after a distinguished playing career at Nottingham Forest and 14 England caps – 12 more than Brian – even though the son's love and admiration for the father who was arguably the most arresting managerial talent English football has ever seen, was inevitably clouded by fear and perhaps even loathing of the alcoholic addiction and the outrageousness with which all that brilliant, blazing instinct was so doggedly accompanied.

Clough Snr's anger could spill out to engulf even those he admired to the point of idolatry. You couldn't know if many brooding hours had been invested in such eruptions or whether they had come to him in single flashes of brutal calculation. They just invaded you with the sense that this was a man who reinvented himself and his strategy from moment to moment, mood to mood.

I was made aware of this the first time I spoke to him as a young reporter who had been charmed and flattered by the stately touch of Matt Busby and the puckish humour of Joe Mercer. It was 1968 – a year after his appointment – and a week or so after one of his most important signings, that of the legendary Dave Mackay of Spurs and Scotland.

Mackay had arrived with immense fanfare in Derby and Clough had declared that the Scot was the finest player ever to wear the shirt of the great club Tottenham, a player of both genius and the deepest strength, and so naturally after introducing myself and asking a few routine questions, I mentioned the great man and wondered how he was settling down at his new club.

"Settling down?" Clough repeated with an edge in his voice. "Take this down," he said. "I have just had Dave Mackay in my office and told him that if he doesn't improve, if he doesn't start reminding me of some of the reasons why I have paid good money for the bugger (£5,000 to Spurs and at least as much again in a signing-on bonus), he is going to be out of here faster than his feet can touch the ground. I do not pay for reputations, I do not sign has-beens. They are no good to me – or this football club. Mackay played for me the other night and I've told him I will not put up with another performance like that. He was a bloody disgrace."

I asked if we were on the record and he said we were. A little stunned, I filed the story to the Daily Express. It ran across the country and made another of those early announcements that Clough intended to operate entirely on his own judgements and according to his own rules.

It was not usual to speak of a magnificent player like Dave Mackay in such terms. Yet it is also true that Mackay, who was 34 at the time, did not rail against Clough's outburst, however angered he was. He played his way into the heart of the club he would later lead to a league title as manager. A few months after that iconoclastic outburst from his young boss, Dave Mackay led Derby to the Second Division championship – and was voted Player of the Year jointly with fellow veteran Tony Book of Manchester City.

Clough had applied his brand to a player who had seen it all and done it all, much of it in the company of the late Danny Blanchflower, another towering figure who could give even Clough a run in any Group One eccentricity race. But Mackay was still driven to new levels of effort by the strange and utterly original force of the man who was now in charge of his career. Mackay never fully explained the mystery of that motivation, no more than another of Clough's key players, the brilliant midfield craftsman Archie Gemmill, who signed for Clough in 1970 and then joined him at Forest. Gemmill, who was recently voted into Scottish Football's Hall of Fame, said, "Don't ask me why we played so hard for Brian Clough. I can't really tell you. It will always be a bit of a mystery. Part of it no doubt was fear."

Mostly fear of the uncharted. Clough sacked tea ladies misguided enough to smile and laugh in the wake of a Derby defeat. He slapped players – though, it needs to be stressed, not Mackay, who once suspended the late, notably combative, Billy Bremner in the air with so much disdain he might have been grabbing hold of an irritating pooch. He punched fans and even spanked a couple of Derby youngsters who threw snowballs at his Merc. Even now you only have to reach down at random and pick out a quote and see how easily he conveyed self-belief.

For some fleeting examples, "If a player had said to Bill Shankly, 'I've got to speak to my agent', Bill would have hit him – and I would have held him while he hit him" and, "I certainly wouldn't say I'm the best manager in the business but I'm the top one."

Taking the long view, it is easier to see that the Clough cocktail worked on different people in different ways but almost invariably with a positive result. Some players responded to the bullying, the sense that they were obliged to show their commitment every day, every training session – "Get in there," he would cry, "that's what I pay you for." Others, more independent spirits like Mackay and, later Martin O'Neill, could see his effect on the others, and the likelihood that it would bring success in which they could share.

What cannot ever be taken out of the Clough equation is the pain and the horror that came to him when his career, so brilliant with Middlesbrough mostly in the Second Division, came to a premature end through crippling injury. His lack of all but fleeting recognition at the international level undoubtedly left permanent scars, and when the wounds were still fresh he complained that it had not been easy leading England while playing in between Bobby Charlton and Jimmy Greaves.

Clough the young firebrand player was once poignantly recalled by Malcolm Allison, a similarly revolutionary football man. Allison, while centre-half of West Ham, had faced Clough at Upton Park. He said, "He was so cocky, I said to myself, 'Kid, I'm going to teach you a lesson' – but the trouble was I couldn't get near him. He was so quick, so sure about everything he did."

Between leaving Derby in 1973 and joining Nottingham Forest two years later there was a brief hiatus of uncertainty. Once I travelled across London with him on the tube after he had walked out of Brighton. He talked about his disillusionment with football and speculated that he might have had enough of it, and that impression was compounded soon enough when he arrived at Elland Road, dressed in squash clothes and hand in hand with his son Nigel, and started insulting the reigning league champions Leeds almost from the moment he accepted the manager's job. Nothing he had said at Derby compared with his shattering statement to his new players, "As far as I'm concerned you can throw all those medals in the bin, because you won them all by cheating."

Clough lasted 44 days at Elland Road, did almost every wrong that was possible, yet 20 years later the key Leeds player John Giles declared, "Whatever mistakes he made at Leeds, there is no doubt that he is a genius." That certainly is the burden Nigel Clough (right) carries as he takes charge of Derby County. When his father walked out of the Baseball Ground, after an "irreparable" breakdown in his relationship with the directors, some speculated that he might be a football meteor, brilliant but burned out, and not many were prepared to believe that within a decade he would twice lead Forest to the European Cup. Yet for others, and not least the players of Derby County, it was inconceivable that he would be lost to football so quickly. Some of them were encountered in a corridor of the Baseball Ground on that last day of his Derby reign.

They were led by the goalkeeper Colin Boulton, one of only four players retained by the manager after his first analysis of the club's strength. Boulton had seen Derby before and after Clough and he could not believe that it was over. Boulton was carrying an axe. He said it was to smash down the boardroom door if the players' delegation was denied entry.

The players were allowed in but their pleadings came to nothing. Yet who could forget the axe? There could have been no more dramatic and in some ways fitting symbol of Clough in the Derby Years.

Battering Ram: Clough's Derby years

*Derby's league places under Clough

1967-68 ......... 18th ........Second Division

1968-69 ......... 1st ......... Second Division

1969-70 ......... 4th ......... First Division

1970-71 ......... 9th ......... First Division

1971-72 ......... 1st ......... First Division

1972-73 ......... 7th ......... First Division