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Brian Clough
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Brian Clough was a Derby legend.
With his assistant manager Peter Taylor he took the club by the scruff of the neck and albeit for a brief moment in the 70s made us top dogs.
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Brian Clough - His time at Derby
When Brian Clough and Peter Taylor arrived at Derby in 1967 the club was languishing in the lower reaches of the Second Division and could have had no idea about the glories it would enjoy under the pair.
Clough had caught the eye of chairman Sam Longson as he and Taylor built Hartlepool United up from obscurity to eighth in Division Four.
Aston Villa and West Brom were both after Clough, but a trip to Scotch Corner by Longson secured his signature - and Taylor's into the bargain.
Clough's first promise to Rams fans was untypically understated - that the club would finish higher than their previous season's 17th. It was also untypically false - they would finish 18th in 1967-68.
The next season, however, was a whole different kettle of fish - the Clough revolution had begun.
Longson's money was soon being spent by his new manager - in came John O'Hare from Sunderland, Alan Hinton from Nottingham Forest, 17-year-old John Robson from youth soccer in the North East and Richie Barker from Burton Albion.
But the best £25,000 Clough and Taylor ever spent was on 19-year-old Tranmere Rovers centre-half Roy McFarland, the backbone of the club's success and later to manage the club.
A taste of the success that lay in store for Derby came in the 1967 League Cup, when the Rams got all the way to the semi-finals with a largely reserve side. High-flying First Division Leeds United eventually put out the Rams 4-2 on aggregate.
Although players such as Kevin Hector and Colin Boulton were already at the Baseball Ground, the rebuilding was constant - Les Green arrived from Rochdale, John McGovern from Hartlepool and Willie Carlin for £60,000 from Sheffield United. And in the close season before the start of the 68-69 season came another Clough-Taylor masterstroke - Dave Mackay, legendary double-winning Spurs wing-half, was persuaded by Clough to come to Derby.
The Rams' 68-69 season, which would see them crowned Second Division champions, was kick-started by a 3-1 victory over Chelsea at the Baseball Ground in October. On November 30 goals from Carlin and McFarland in a 2-0 win over Crystal Palace put the Rams top of Division Two - and they were never headed top spot for the rest of the season.
Back in the First Division there were memorable wins over Everton, Newcastle and Tottenham in a dream start that saw Derby the last Division One side to be defeated.
Home defeats by Coventry and Manchester City and away losses to Leeds and Arsenal brought the club and its fans back to ground, but after the £100,000 signing of Terry Hennessey the Rams won eight and drew four of their last 12 matches of the campaign, ending up fourth in their first season back in the top flight.
The UEFA Cup place that should have been Derby's was denied them by a joint FA/Football League inquiry into financial maladministration - and halfway through the 70-71 season the town was rocked further by the financial collapse of Rolls-Royce.
Clough's response was typical - he splashed out a club-record £170,000 on Colin Todd and £50,000 on Archie Gemmill.
Despite starting the season with a 4-1 victory over Manchester United in the Watney Cup final, the team that Clough built drifted for most of the campaign and ended up ninth - but the best was still to come.
Mackay, who had been hugely influential in the Rams promotion to Division One and their excellent first season, departed for the player-manager's post at Swindon before the beginning of the 71-72 campaign and new skipper Rpy McFarland was missing through flu, but after the first 12 matches Derby were the only unbeaten team in Division One and lying third in Division One.
By the New Year the Rams had slipped to fifth after four successive defeats, but by the beginning of February they were back in contention - third after wins over Chelsea, Southampton and Coventry.
By Easter Saturday - after the embarassing non-signing of Ian Storey-Moore - they were second, and after playing their last game of the season - a thrilling 1-0 win over Liverpool - they were top. They also won the Texaco Cup aainst Airdrie.
Despite heading the league, no-one expected the Rams to be champions - Leeds needed only a point against Wolves to claim the double - and the players had headed off to Majorca with Peter Taylor, while Clough was with his family in the Scilly Isles.
But on Monday, May 8, 1972, Wolves pulled off a shock win - and Derby, with Brian Clough and Peter Taylor at their head, were champions of England.
This time there would be no denial of the European place, and the 72-73 European Cup campaign orchestrated by Clough was a memorable one.
Zeljeznicar Sarajevo proved no match for Derby in the first round, and a second round first leg home 3-0 victory over the mighty Benfica was enough to put Derby into the quarter-finals, where they disposed of Spartak Trnava of Czechslovakia and gave themselves a semi-final berth against the mighty Benfica.
Clough had no illusions about the Rams eventual defeat by Juventus - he said at the time they were cheated out of it, and he was still saying so 25 years later. Roy McFarland and Archie Gemmill were both booked for trivial offences in the first leg - ruling them out of the second - and Clough always maintained that the West German referee was bribed. Whatever did go on, a 3-1 away defeat and a 0-0 home draw put the Rams out.
Back in the league, poor form on their travels cost the Rams dear as they lost 12 away matches and finished seventh. Kevin Hector led the league scorers with 14, including two in a remarkable FA Cup fourth-round replay away at Spurs when the Rams were 3-1 down with ten minutes and won 5-3 after extra time.
But just 12 matches into the 1973-74 season it was all over - Sam Longson's resentment of Clough's media profile brought the relationship between the two to an all-time low, and Clough and Taylor were bounced into resigning - a decision Clough would later call "the worst I ever made".
In six-and-a-quarter seasons at the Baseball Ground, Clough and Taylor had won the Second Division championship, the Watney and Teaxco cups, the First Division championship and taken Derby to the semi-final of the European Cup.
The success the pair had could - and should - have been a springboard for even better things and Clough never hides his disappointment that the success he subsequently enjoyed with Forest was not achieved at Derby.
Clough and Taylor always believed they could have brought the kind of league domination Liverpool enjoyed in the 70s to Derby, but it was not to be.
He may have been authoritarian and eccentric, but as a manager and a figurehead, Brian Clough's record at Derby is second to none.
The Rams were never the same once Brian Clough arrived, and they would never be the same once he left.
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