Now then,

I imagine it would be like this:

I’ve lost the best friend I ever had. He’s gone. The thing that gets me is that he played such an important role in my life. For a while, it was as if we were almost like a married couple. He made me smile when things looked bleak. He always made me laugh. He balanced me, he kept my feet on the ground and together we achieved so much. We made so many miracles.

We did good cop, bad cop and everyone who faced us would inevitably give in. We came from nowhere, poor North Eastern miner’s families and we went on to achieve things that no two men together would ever achieve again. No one ever expected that there would be two of us, working together; a team.

I let him down. I took the glory that he gave me. I never shared the recognition with him that he deserved. We built teams together. He chose the right players and I motivated them. I shouted and he smiled. He made me laugh and it was only once he had gone that I realised how much I needed that. I needed not to take myself so seriously, all the time. I knew I came across as an arrogant bugger all along, it was the act I put on. He was the one I shared that with and he knew that the act was what it was. He knew the vulnerability, my kindness, my love and my wanting to be loved. He stood in awe of it and was part of it and he said little and never let on.

His eyes could never hide that smile he wore. In the dressing room the players looked to the oceans of calm that he gave them, even as I punched the air from their stomachs. Both of us were looking for something exceptional, something that would never ever be matched again. He did it by finding the best. The players that other teams had forgotten, ignored or dismissed as past their best. Then I would scream, kick their arses, motivate the shitholes and care for them in equal measures. In between his kindness and belief and my furious ambition, they would find greatness.

The fans chant it sometimes: “Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor.”

The goalscorer and the goalkeeper at Middlesbrough, the friends at Hartlepool and Brighton. The team that led Derby County, silly provincial Derby County to a League win and then to just be cheated out of a European Cup win by cheats and bribes that would be a feature of our forays into Europe for a long time to come. The Derby side we built would have soon rivalled Liverpool; if it wasn’t for Longson, who knows what Derby might have become? We made the stupid mistake of resigning from the club we built from nothing as we thought the fans would overthrow the chairman and we could go back to the jobs we loved.

We should have realised. The fans are the little people. The Directors with their sandwiches and wine have money and can make demands. At this time, the players were just the workers. Only the Directors had the sandwiches which were paid for by the fans. The miners, the soldiers, the paper boys – the people that really mattered.

When Nottingham Forest became my inevitable kingdom, when their constitution meant weak chairmen and a Manager that was God, Peter was the first lover that I called for. There were lots of others from the former times that would come and join me – McGovern, O’Hare, Todd; yet the only one that mattered was Taylor. He had such an eye for talent, he could discover the one player with real heart in any youth, reserve or first team game. Tony Woodcock, Gary Birtles, John Robertson – I could write a page of names. Players that might seem lumbering idiots when we first worked with them, but Taylor realised what they were worth. Shilton, Lloyd, Burns – his talent for realising what rough clay I could mould, bend and break led us to something that seemed impossible.

People did not understand the idea of a management partnership. The Board at Forest did not understand my wanting Peter next to me, making me laugh. Making me feel real.

AndthenNottinghamForestwontheAngloScottishCupgotpromoted
andweretheLeagueCupwinnersandwontheLeagueChampionshipandwerethe
bestteaminEnglandandwontheEuropeancupandwerethebestteaminEuropeand
losttheLeagueCupandwontheEuropeanCupagainbecomingtheonlyteamtoever
wintheEuropeanCuptwiceandtheirdomesticleagueonceandhad48unbeatengames.

At the end of the second European Cup Final, Peter turned to me and shook my hand. We looked into each other’s eyes. We knew we were invincible, we could do anything. He told the press that the only thing we had not conquered was the FA Cup. In our hideaway outside Madrid, Barcelona Football Club people were talking to us about Peter, Trevor Francis and me joining them. Peter had a villa in Majorca and he loved the Spanish sunshine and we were all so tempted.

The players stood at the Council House and held the trophy up to a crowd bigger than we ever saw at any home game and we wondered about warm weekends in Spain. We had thrown an unknown eighteen year old – Gary Mills – into a final and won. We had beaten Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg side – a team he had joined believing them better than any team in England – completely. It was our fourth win in five cup finals inside three years.

The talks in Spain came to nothing, but for some reason Peter wanted to go back to Derby again. To build them a team again. It came to nothing.

In fact, everything fell apart in 1982. We’d lost in Europe and finished 12th in the First Division. Somehow it was if he’s lost the magic he had in finding players, as if the sun had revolved away from him. We’d paid big money for Ian Wallace, for Fashanu and for Peter Ward- all Taylor recommendations. Fashanu was remembered for one goal he had scored against Liverpool and Forest shelled out a million on him because of that. He was clearly openly gay, something I struggled to understand. He was terrified of me. We bought him for a million and sold him to Notts County for a hundred thousand in the end. He said it was because he could not bear to be near me. It took us years to recover the money we’d lost.

Taylor had written a book. ‘With Clough, by Taylor’. He never discussed it with me before it was published, but when I read it, I realised it was a betrayal. He had released my fears, my hopes and my weaknesses to the world without my permission. We fell out, the strain made him ill. His nerves were gone. I did everything I could to get him the best leaving package possible from Forest.

JustinFashanuWithCloughbyTaylorPetermanagerofDerby

JohnRobertsontoDerbyCountyDerbyfailedPeterdied.

We hadn’t spoken in so long. He asked me back to Derby to join him and I refused to talk to him.

I never picked up the phone. It is so simple to pick up a phone.

I never said I was sorry. I wish I could have said I was sorry.

14th October 1990. My best friend’s funeral and we had not spoken for years.

I wanted to be able to see Peter’s family. Lillian, his daughter Wendy, and his son Phillip. Our children had virtually been brought up together.

The fans chant it sometimes: “Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor.”

I never imagined Peter dying out there. I never imagined him dying at all. I wish he hadn’t. I wish he was still around and talking the way we used to and going to football matches and telling one another that we’d have done it better if we were in charge of the teams that we’d just watched.*

When divorce comes, it’s a sign of failure. However relieved you are, you have lost a dream. If you have learnt to hate the partner you had, despite the fighting, it’s a tragedy.

I walked out onto the pitch of the 1991 FA Cup Final at Wembley holding the hand of Terry Venables, the Spurs manager. I afterwards admitted I wanted Peter to be there. I wanted to hold his hand. When he was not there, I felt lost. I made the mistake of not talking to the team before extra time. We were lost before then. I was lost before then. I had not conquered the FA Cup. I had not conquered my need to be with Peter.

Now then, now and then.

In his book ‘Provided You Don’t Kiss Me’, Duncan Hamilton calls for some kind of monument at Forest for Peter Taylor.

My own feeling is that without Taylor, there was no Clough. I know Clough went on to build more great teams, but what great teams after that, might they have built together? With Taylor, Clough achieved the world. Without him there came just two League Cups.

The story of Clough and Taylor also has a massive moral for all of us. I honestly believe that Clough fell to bits and became such a drunk in the end because of his failure to pick up a phone and talk to his old friend. I actually believe that the breakdown in this friendship brought about the death of both men.

There are too few great men in this world. Taylor deserves recognition by both Forest and Derby as one of them. A statue; a stand at least.

Peter Taylor: Died 4th October 1990.
To Forest he died in 1982.

Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor…

As I’d like to imagine Brian saying it: God bless mate and night night.

I’ll see thee.

_{*I have tried to imagine what Brian Clough might have said about Taylor and included just one direct quote from his autobiography to back up those ideas.}