So naturally he chased him off the course, as he had an English journalist who showed up in Cuba recently in the hope of sharing some philosophical musings as they strolled down the fairways.On this last occasion, however, the great,turbulent footballer mellowed. He took a good look at the boy, who had gamely re-presented himself, and burst into tears. He said he planned to spend some time with his son, who in Naples is rated a first-class prospect and is already a celebrated member of the Italian Under-17 team.When the boy was born there was salt in the Neapolitain air. The team had won, largely on the back of Diego, their one and only scudetto They draped Vesuvius in the blue flag of Napoli And, eventually, they made some coffee Plainly, it was of the finest quality.. The realists at Wolverhampton Wanderers will have one goal and one goal alone next season: Premiership survival. As if fighting their way out of the First Division via the play-offs has not been tough enough, they will know that keeping their place in the top flight next year will be an even mightier challenge. This year is the 25th anniversary of Nottingham Forest’s last championship, which was achieved, remarkably, just 12 months after Brian Clough’s team won promotion from the old Second Division.
It is a feat which no team has equalled since.Having scrambled into the third promotion spot from the Second Division, Forest went on to take the First Division by storm. They began with 10 wins in their first 13 games and ended it with an unbeaten run of 26. The title was theirs by 22 April, with four games to play.”It could not happen in the modern game,” says John McGovern, who went on to win the European Cup as Forest’s captain. “The top clubs have so much money they have secured their position and breaking into that clique is virtually impossible.”McGovern, 53 now but showing few signs of the passing years, became a familiar face again around the City Ground in the season just ended as Paul Hart’s team narrowly failed in their own promotion campaign, reaching the play-off semi-finals. McGovern has been a match-day host and a commentator for BBC Radio Nottingham, whose listeners have been assured that the miracle of 1979 will never be repeated.What Clough did, with the considerable aid of his cohort, Peter Taylor, was to take, in McGovern’s words, “a group branded by the press as no-hopers and has-been semi-stars and mould them into an unbeatable unit. From November 1977 to November 1978 we went 42 League games without defeat In two campaigns in the European Cup we suffered one defeat.
In terms of consistency, we would have blown any of today’s teams out of the water.”The edge that Clough and Taylor had, McGovern believes, lay in their choice of players and their ability to motivate them, as well as each other. “They built a team around the creative genius of John Robertson, bought the best goalkeeper in the world in Peter Shilton and supported him with dedicated, intelligent players who knew what to do with the ball wherever it was on the pitch,” he says.”Intelligence was the quality that ran through the team. Not in an academic sense, I regret to say, but in football terms, players who could read the game We knew where to go when we had the ball. That’s why so many of the team went into management.”Clough and Taylor made a few decisions that were quite brilliant. Buying Shilton was one, but buying Kenny Burns from Birmingham and using him as a defender was the real stroke of genius. He was a forward, but they played him at centre-half because they could see he could defend and they knew when he had the ball he could use it. To team up Burns with Larry Lloyd at the back was an inspired move.”Even so, at the start of the 1978-79 season, no one had an inkling of what was to come.
“We didn’t even have anything in our contracts to pay bonuses if we won the league, which gives you an idea of how unlikely it seemed,” McGovern recalls. “Not even Clough and Taylor could imagine how the season would go.”By halfway, however, it was clear Forest would take some stopping. “We were top of the League by Christmas and I can remember sitting in the bath after we had won at Newcastle on 28 December and saying to David Needham: ‘The way we are playing, nobody will catch us now.’ A couple of weeks before that we had won 4-0 at Old Trafford, when we were so superior it could have been 10-0. It was football perfection.”It did not matter whether we played at home or away. We had that lovely mixture of experience and youth, enthusiasm and commitment, and a manager in Clough who could extract the maximum from his players.”There were other managers who could build title-winning teams but no one who could do it so quickly and with so few resources as Clough. At Derby he took a struggling Second Division side to the semi-finals of the European Cup in four years, and at Forest he took a side in danger of being relegated to the Third Division and won five trophies with them. He was a phenomenon.”McGovern was a fixture in Clough’s teams at four clubs – Hartlepool, Derby, Leeds and Forest – yet says the two were never close.”His character and mine were completely opposite.
