There are some footballers who look like Liverpool players long before they ever get the chance to pull on the famous red shirt.
There will be elements of their skillset or personality (or both) which look made to measure for the Reds and can lead transfer-hungry fans to scour transfer gossip columns and the like for any clue they might find that could suggest the object of their adoration might one day be bound for Anfield.
Sometimes it just never comes to pass - and this correspondent is among those who still lament Liverpool’s failure to sign Teddy Sheringham from Tottenham in the late 1990s (particularly after where he went instead and what followed) - but sometimes it does and goes even better than everyone hoped, Virgil Van Dijk being a prime example.
Sometimes though, the supposed ‘dream’ move does happen but for whatever reason just doesn’t work out - Spanish striker Fernando Morientes being a case in point - and this week marks the anniversary of the barely-noticed departure from Anfield of a player who arrived with great hopes of being just what the Reds needed and made a brilliant start but faded fast and saw what should have been the peak years of his playing career wither on the vine.
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Nigel Clough had long been admired by sections of the Liverpool crowd and beyond during his near-decade with Nottingham Forest, the son of the East Midlands club’s notorious manager Brian having arrived at the City Ground as an apprentice upon leaving school in 1982 and turning professional two years later. Whereas Clough senior was a prolific goalscorer in his playing days, scoring a startling 251 goals in only 274 league games for Middlesbrough and Sunderland before a serious knee injury cut his career short at the age of 27, young Nigel - while also a forward player - played deeper, often in what would be referred to now as the number ten role, and was more of a creative force while still chipping in with his fair share as Forest enjoyed something of a renaissance in the late 1980s.
The end of the previous decade has seen Clough’s team stun English and European football with one of the most unlikely periods of success ever seen. The two-time FA Cup winners were languishing in the Second Division when Clough, who alongside long-time number two Peter Taylor had led East Midlands rivals Derby County to a first ever league championship in 1971/72, took over as manager in January 1975, twelve weeks after his infamous, 44-day tenure in charge of Leeds United. With Taylor rejoining him as assistant in July 1976, Forest secured the third promotion spot the following May to return to the top flight before a year later becoming only the fifth side ever (and only the second that century) to win the Second and First Division titles in successive seasons, in so doing ending Bob Paisley’s Liverpool’s hopes for a third successive championship.
A rivalry was emerging between the sides with Clough's men edging a highly-contentious League Cup final replay between the sides at Old Trafford that same season and, although the Reds would make up for their title disappointment by retaining the European Cup against Bruges at Wembley, the European draw the following September paired the two English clubs and Forest ended Liverpool’s two-year reign before going on to lift the trophy themselves in their first season competing for it, beating Swedish champions Malmo in the Munich final and retaining it a year later in Madrid with victory over Kevin Keegan's Hamburg, a remarkable achievement for a provincial club unlikely to ever be repeated. Taylor would retire in 1982 and and Clough’s side went into a period of relative decline before emerging again towards the end of the decade to become a force again with young players like Clough junior, Stuart Pearce, Neil Walker and Des Walker coming to the fore.
Forest won the League Cup in 1989 and 1990 while also reaching the FA Cup semi-finals in 1988 and 1989 - losing on both occasions to Liverpool - before eventually reaching the final in 1991, Clough senior’s long-awaited first appearance in English football’s showpiece event, only for Des Walker’s extra-time own goal to hand victory to Tottenham. His side made a winning start to the inaugural Premier League season a year later, beating Liverpool 1-0 at home in the first Sky Sports ’Super Sunday’, but form soon fell away and they would be relegated after finishing bottom of the table with Clough - who would later admit his judgement had become impaired by heavy drinking - retiring at the end of the campaign, an undistinguished end to his 18 years in charge at the City Ground.
Inevitably Forest’s better players would be cherry-picked by clubs looking to capitalise on the East Midlands club’s demise, with newly-crowned champions Manchester United winning the battle with Kenny Dalglish’s Blackburn Rovers for the signature of highly-rated 21-year-old Republic of Ireland midfielder Roy Keane and it was a sign of the times that Liverpool were never seriously in the conversation for a player who had been handed his debut in English football by Clough at Anfield less than years earlier. The Reds under Dalglish's guidance had won a tenth league championship in fifteen seasons and it seemed like Anfield’s relentless procession of glory would never end but the manager’s shock resignation in February 1991 - as the strain he shouldered following the Hillsborough disaster less than two years earlier in which 97 Liverpool supporters were unlawfully killed became intolerable and began to affect his health - heralded the end of the most dominant period of success English football had ever seen.
Dalglish was eventually replaced as manager by fellow Scot Graeme Souness but, although the Scot would win the FA Cup in his first full year in charge, a sixth-place league finish - Liverpool’s lowest for almost 30 years - was indicative of the severe decline setting in and the following campaign the wheels well and truly came off. The Reds’ season was effectively over in January when third-tier Bolton Wanderers humiliated the holders at Anfield in an FA Cup third round replay and there was even the unthinkable prospect of relegation when Souness’s side lay only three points above the drop zone in early March. A late-season run saw the previous year’s sixth-place finish matched but, with the club failing to qualify for Europe for the first time since they began competing on the continent under Bill Shankly in 1964 and the manager the previous spring having tarnished his reputation forever in the eyes of many having sold the story of his heart operation to the S*n newspaper - reviled and boycotted across Merseyside and beyond as it still is today for its repugnant and damaging lies about about the behaviour of Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough - speculation was rife Souness’s time as manager was about to brought to an end, especially when he was absent from the final-day 6-2 home victory over Tottenham.
An Anfield press conference was called the following day but, to the surprise of many, Souness was given a stay of execution by chairman David Moores with Boot Room stalwart Roy Evans promoted to assistant manager although it was not a unanimous decision within the boardroom, with director Tony Ensor resigning in protest. Having put his faith in the Scot, the Liverpool chairman backed him in the transfer market and, with the Reds still light up front after the departure of Dean Saunders barely a year after his £2.9m British record transfer from Derby County, Souness swooped in early June for Clough in a £2.2m deal.
“I think it’s the perfect move for Nigel”, new Forest manager Frank Clark admitted. “We fought tooth and nail to keep him, but if I’d just been a friend I would have said it was the right time to leave us. Nigel is 27, and he needs to be playing at the correct club, one where players will pass the ball to feet. Liverpool are right for him, and I’m sure he’ll respond to the new challenge.”
Graeme Souness was among those who thought Clough could be ‘the new Kenny Dalglish’ and said, “If Nigel performs for us as he has done for Forest in recent seasons then this will be a good value deal”, adding regards the transfer fee paid which proved a compromise with Liverpool offering £1.5m and Forest wanting £3m, “The fee could have been better, but it could have been worse.” The following month he spent a further £2.5m on Tottenham centre back Neil Ruddock, a record fee for a defender for a week until Sheffield Wednesday brought former Forest defender Des Walker back to England from Sampdoria in Italy for £2.7m, enabling Liverpudlians - whose distress at their own side’s fall from grace had only only exacerbated by the rise to prominence of bitter rivals Manchester United - to go into the 1993/94 campaign with some optimism the Reds may now be in a position to challenge the newly-crowned champions from Old Trafford, particularly when Souness’s side made an excellent start.
Handed the iconic number seven shirt previously worn by the likes of Kevin Keegan, Kenny Dalglish and Peter Beardsley, Clough - who had never won or scored at Anfield in his previous appearances with Forest - made a dream debut in the 2-0 opening day victory at home to Trevor Francis’s Sheffield Wednesday, putting Liverpool in front six minutes before half time with a rising shot from the edge of the box and adding another two minutes after the break from close-range after Ruddock’s header from Stig-Inge Bjornebye’s left-wing corner had been parried by Owls goalkeeper Chris Woods. “I’d have liked a goal myself but he is always sharp around the box”, Ruddock said afterwards of his fellow new boy. “Playing against him he has always been a tough opponent, so having him in our side is a great bonus. I think Brian Clough will be happy with his young man."
Clough was on the mark again four days later with an expertly-taken backheel in a 3-1 win at Queens Park Rangers and, although he didn’t get on the scoresheet the following weekend as the Reds went top of the Premier League for the first time with a 5-0 triumph at newly-promoted Swindon Town, his encouraging start to life on Merseyside continuing when he opened the scoring in front of the Kop three days later against Tottenham. Spurs hit back to win 2-1 though and, although Leeds were beaten at Anfield the following weekend to make it four wins from the opening five games, three successive defeats without even scoring a goal at Coventry City, at home to Blackburn and at Goodison Park - an abject 2-0 surrender against a poor Everton side who would only escape relegation by the skin of their teeth of the final day of the season - was a sobering reality check, with the signing of self-styled West Ham hardman Julian Dicks the day before the derby defeat and Liverpool players fighting among themselves on the Goodison pitch indicative of a worrying direction of travel.
Souness reacted to his side’s Goodison horror show by giving highly-rated teenage striker Robbie Fowler a full debut in the midweek League Cup second round first leg trip to Fulham, the 18-year-old finding the net with the first of what would be 183 goals for Liverpool in a 3-1 victory, and although Clough was also on the scoresheet at Craven Cottage, the emergence of the ‘Toxteth Terror’ would have serious implications for the former Nottingham Forest man. In his first Anfield start a fortnight later in the second leg against Fulham, Fowler would score all the goals in a 5-0 Reds win and, after the teenager notched his first league effort 10 days later in a late comeback win over strugglers Oldham Athletic, Clough was left out of the next league game against Southampton at Anfield in which Fowler further underlined his precocious goalscoring potential with his first league hat-trick for Liverpool.
Clough scored his first league goal for over two months after being restored to the side in a deeper role behind Fowler and Rush the following weekend in a 2-0 win over West Ham but even though the victory moved the Reds up to fifth, their form was far from convincing, the Guardian writing afterwards, “It is impossible to take Liverpool's rise into fifth place totally seriously. There remains no plausible pattern to their play, and it was not altogether clear when the Kop chanted 'Who the f****** hell are you?' whether they were referring to the opposition or their own team.”
A 3-0 defeat at Kevin Keegan’s newly-promoted Newcastle saw Clough dropped again and by the time he was back in the side at Sheffield United on Boxing Day, another season was lurching towards mediocrity with the Reds already having lost seven league matches and been knocked out of the League Cup by Wimbledon. But he and Souness’ Liverpool would have one last hurrah when Manchester United arrived at Anfield in the first week of January.
Alex Ferguson’s side had finally ended Old Trafford’s 26-year wait for a league championship the previous May and looked heavy favourites to retain their title having racked up a 12-point lead over nearest challengers Blackburn with Reds languishing 21 points behind in seventh. The Kop created an electric spectacle of noise and colour beforehand with the famous old terrace due to be demolished at the end of the season to make way for an all-seated stand in its place to comply with the legislation introduced in the wake of Hillsborough but most of Anfield was stunned into silence as the champions raced into a three goal lead inside 23 minutes courtesy of Steve Bruce, Ryan Giggs and Denis Irwin.
Clough restored some hope and helped the Kop rediscover their voices two minutes later with an opportunist 30-yard drive which skimmed beyond Peter Schmeichel and further reduced the deficit seven minutes before the break by running onto a ricochet off former team-mate Roy Keane and firing home from the edge of the box, Ruddock completing the comeback eleven minutes from time to earn Liverpool an unlikely and heartening point. “Clough was to emerge from the first 45 minutes as the key figure in midfield”, the Guardian reported afterwards. “So anonymous at times since his move to Liverpool, on this night he seemed transformed. 'You have seen the best of me but not enough of me,' he told Liverpool supporters recently. They had not. Clough has rarely played better and was to crown his performance with Liverpool's first two goals.”
It later emerged that a stunned and incandescent Alex Ferguson ‘sacked’ Peter Schmeichel after a dressing room row between the pair following United’s collapse, although the United boss would graciously admit in the immediate aftermath, “That's the first time I've ever lost a three-goal lead but it was incredible, a marvellous game. I was raging at losing that lead, but the third goal made us a bit sloppy and Liverpool deserved it.”
The courageous fightback against a United side who would stroll to another league title could only paper over the cracks for a little longer however and, although the next two league matches against Oldham and Manchester City both resulted in victories, a second successive FA Cup third round replay humiliation at Anfield to lower-league opposition - this time second-tier Bristol City - saw Souness sacked and replaced by Roy Evans as the Liverpool board sought to go back to basics. Clough was in the new manager’s first starting line-up, a 2-2 draw at Norwich, but after playing in the following week’s 4-2 hiding at Southampton made only three more starts before the end of the season which concluded with the Reds in eighth.
Fowler’s remarkable 18-goal debut season (which had seen him miss two months with broken leg) had confirmed his status as Rush’s regular partner and, with Evans during the summer revamping the side by moving to a three centre-backs system, Clough’s opportunities became even more limited, the former Forest man making only two starts and a handful of substitute appearances before the final weeks of a season in which Liverpool coasted to the finish line after winning the League Cup in early April, a tough period in the 28-year-old’s career which was made more difficult by his father’s notorious ability to let his mouth run away from him.
Brian Clough’s maverick and highly quotable personality had ruffled feathers throughout his long managerial career and was thought to be the chief reason he was never offered the England job he reputedly had his heart set on and was interviewed for twice. ‘Old Big ‘Ead’, as he liked to refer to himself, had admirers on Merseyside though who for all his idiosyncrasies respected Clough's trophy-winning prowess for lesser-lights such as Derby and Forest, as well as his reputation for plain-speaking which, while very much of its time, often upset the right people and usually seemed to have at least some element of humanity to it.
So in November 1994, there was some sense of shock along with hurt and deep anger when his autobiography, ghost-written by a S*n journalist, was published and contended when discussing the Hillsborough disaster his own Nottingham Forest club had been witness to, “Many mistakes were made at Hillsborough but I will always remain convinced that those Liverpool fans who died were killed by Liverpool people. This is my opinion, made not in the heat of the moment or the immediate, angry aftermath but after following all the publicity and the official inquiry.”
Twelve months earlier, the campaign for justice had suffered a grievous blow which would take nearly another two decades to rectify when a judicial review at the High Court in London upheld the deeply-flawed original inquest verdicts of accidental death and there was an intense outcry at the cynical attempt from Clough and his publishers to exploit the disaster from bereaved families as well as Hillsborough survivors, players, Liverpool and Nottingham councillors and MPs. Clough was initially unrepentant however, doubling-down on his vile assertions when dismissing a proposed boycott of his book in Liverpool by saying, “Half of them can’t read and the other half are pinching hubcaps” while, notwithstanding his own struggle with alcoholism, insisting to Channel 4 chat show host Clive Anderson, “They were drunk. They killed their own” and that his allegations had been watered down claiming “I would have got into more trouble if it had all gone in.” He did eventually publicly apologise three years before his death from stomach cancer at the age of 69 in 2004, claiming to have changed his opinion after realising he had been misinformed but only after pressure from the editor of FourFourTwo when a boycott was threatened by Liverpool fans after the magazine had signed him as a star columnist.
Clough’s son Nigel, who had been in the Forest team that fateful day in Sheffield and had scored in the corresponding fixture the previous season, maintained a dignified silence throughout the whole sorry episode but had been placed in an invidious position by his father and, with the evolution of Evans’ side continuing in the summer of 1995 with the British record £8.5m signing of Nottingham Forest striker Stan Collymore, the writing was on the wall for him at Anfield. He would make only one more start, as the Reds ended an autumnal seven-game winless streak with victory at newly-promoted Bolton Wanderers and in January 1996 joined Manchester City for £1.5m after making only 44 appearances in his two and a half years on Merseyside, scoring nine goals.
Clough played in all of City’s 15 remaining league games, scoring twice, but it was not enough to save the Maine Road club from relegation which was confirmed in a final day 2-2 home draw with Liverpool. He returned to Nottingham Forest briefly on loan the following season and, after another brief loan spell this time at Sheffield Wednesday, was given a free transfer by City when they were relegated to the third tier in May 1998. The following October at the age of 32 he moved into management with Southern Football League Premier Division side Burton Albion, initially as player-boss, and over the next decade - during half of which he continued to play a regular role on the field - led The Brewers from the seventh tier of the English league system to the brink of promotion to League Two.
He left halfway through the 2008/09 season to follow in his father’s footsteps as Derby County manager and, after three years at Pride Park, took over at Sheffield United who he helped save from relegation before taking the Blades to FA Cup and League Cup semi-finals. He returned to Burton in 2015 and the following season took them into the Championship for the first time in the club’s history as well as the League Cup semi-finals in 2019 before stepping down the following year and taking over at Mansfield Town where he remains in charge.
His time at Liverpool did not work out the way he or anyone involved hoped or expected but Clough is philosophical when reflecting back on his spell at Anfield. “I’ll look back and say that I enjoyed my Liverpool days for the most part”, he said. “It was a good place to work at and there were good people to work with. It was the place I wanted to go after I left Nottingham Forest. I was never unhappy being at Liverpool. I was unhappy that I wasn't playing regularly for them. Most players in the country would jump at the chance to go there.”
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