Ken Jones: Clough's brilliance lay not in the beautiful game but in the nitty-gritty of winning

Brian Clough was, in the narrowest and best and most exacting sense of the term, a great football manager. Clough was a winner because he was smarter than most of his competition, because he was an unyielding perfectionist and because he imposed his will on his players with the sheer force of his personality.

Brian Clough was, in the narrowest and best and most exacting sense of the term, a great football manager. Clough was a winner because he was smarter than most of his competition, because he was an unyielding perfectionist and because he imposed his will on his players with the sheer force of his personality.

Football, like the movies, is a director's medium and it doesn't take long for the good ones to put their stamp on a team. There was something old-fashioned in Clough's vision of how the game could and should be played - "If God had meant football to be played in the air, He would have put grass in the sky" - but he left the boldness to others.

Essentially, his teams, particularly those he sent out to win two successive European Cups for Nottingham Forest, were hard to beat, not as free-flowing and adventurous as some seem to remember them. Clough was no tactical innovator; his central defenders were ordered never to cross the halfway line; the system he employed was traditional. However, he understood more than most the importance of putting players in positions where they could be most effective.

Dave Mackay, his mobility impaired by a twice-broken leg, was coming to the end of a great career when Clough signed him for Derby from Tottenham Hotspur in 1968. It turned out to be one of his most inspired signings. With Mackay playing alongside the young Roy McFarland at the centre of defence, a position he had not previously occupied but where the best could be obtained from his vast experience, Derby won promotion the next season.

"Brian was a one off," Mackay told me this week. "Nobody can hope to emulate him. I'd spent 10 years under Bill Nicholson, who could be very demanding, but although they were similar in some ways, certainly when it came to discipline on the field, Brian had a unique way of going about things. He'd come into the dressing-room before a game and set about players, winding them up, then disappear and let Peter Taylor calm things down."

Despite his reputation for unrelenting firmness, Clough was flexible and pragmatic too. Was this a mere expression of the necessary arrogance of a visionary, or was it a necessary tool?

Once, at Derby's old home, the Baseball Ground, I had a long conversation with Clough the day after a defeat at Newcastle. Lubricated by champagne, it went from this to that, eventually touching on the controversy of Colin Todd's withdrawal from an England Under-23 tour the previous summer that had brought the threat of not being considered by Sir Alf Ramsey for international matches at any level.

"The trouble with that young man is that he lacks ambition," Clough said. "He should have gone."

"And yet you supported him," I said. Clough smiled. "I did what was best for this club," he added.

To begin with, Clough was seldom exposed to the public in a vulnerable position, when he wasn't in complete command of everything within a 10-mile radius. Clough's toughness, erupting from his features, was an instrument that communicated fear, frustration, passion. Thus he became the big daddy, and the players his children whose only desire was to please him. No player was safe from his scalding admonition. If Clough didn't actually say it, he was telling them that they were nothing without him.

League champions for the first time in 1972, Derby embarked on a European Cup campaign that saw them drawn against Benfica in the quarter-finals. At first irritated by my presence at the team's hotel, one owned by a mutual friend, Ernie Clay - who would later take control of Fulham - Clough surprisingly agreed to let me travel with the team and watch the game from the trainer's bench. It provided a quite remarkable insight into his volatile relationship with Taylor, one that would end acrimoniously.

Throughout the game, seated on canvas chairs, Clough and Taylor argued about the contribution being made by Derby's fleet-footed left-winger Alan Hinton, leaving instructions to an assistant coach, Jimmy Gordon.

There are questions about Clough that cannot be answered. Upon the announcement of his death, people spoke of Clough as the best manager England never had, some suggesting that had he been given the national team following Don Revie's defection, England would have won the 1982 World Cup. The closest Clough came to the job he unquestionably coveted was when he and Taylor were given charge of the FA Youth team by Ramsey's successor, Ron Greenwood. Running true to form, Clough strengthened opposition to him within the Football Association by crudely insulting the team's medical officer, Dr Frank O'Gorman.

Another imponderable is whether Clough's brusque management style would work in the present era. He was a man of his time, and in that time he gained the respect of his players, for his religion was theirs. Winning.