IN the autumn of 1973, Brian Clough, as manager of Brighton, barged into my – supposedly – "secret" meeting with the Derby County players and ordered them home just because he was not in control of events.
It was sheer madness.
I had just about secured a players' strike, the first in the history of professional football.
And what did he do after sending the players home? He told me to get them to strike by securing the aid of Tommy Mason, a reserve team player! I duly obeyed. It failed miserably.
His need to keep control of players who were no longer his responsibility showed a deep flaw in his character, an Achilles Heel that brought him fame on the one hand and near disaster on the other.
Did he have a guardian angel? Other men would have sunk to disaster but somehow he survived.
Of course Brighton was a mere interlude in his career. It wasn't long before he joined Leeds United. What a farce!
Only weeks earlier he had informed me that the Leeds players were the dirtiest in the business, explaining how Don Revie, their manager, had learnt the art of diving, dropping to the ground under pressure and other Italianate wheezes from competing in Europe.
How did I feel hearing of his move to Leeds? Gutted.
I travelled with him to London by train. He was to stand with (Leeds captain) Billy Bremner at a disciplinary hearing before the FA committee. We joined up for the return journey at St Pancras station in the evening.
"How can you break those players?" I asked him. "You don't like them and they hate you."
This question I posed to him on his 16th day as manager of Leeds.
"I'll sort it out," he said with his customary conviction.
He left the club about three weeks later, happy, he told me, to receive £100,000 in compensation.
There has never been – and never will be again – a manager like Clough.
In the age when players were paid no more than a working man's wage, he was a genius at motivating players, his vision unlimited.
"I regret leaving Derby," he said. "Had we not had a bent referee in the European Cup semi-final against Juventus we'd have won it and gone on to lift the Cup."
His overall achievement in the game was staggering.
He took a lowly Derby County treading water in the Second Division and propelled them to greatness.
Then he took another lower-tier club, Nottingham Forest, leading them to two European Cup wins back to back.
Alex Ferguson may have been Britain's most successful manager but I join Roy Keane in declaring that Brian was the greatest.
He said he wanted to manage England so we would win the World Cup for the second time.
And – wait for it – he didn't want to be paid for such an honour.
"I'd have done it at the same time as managing Nottingham Forest," he said.
He never spoke the shortened "Notts." He was a stickler for protocol and good manners as much as he revelled in himself as the bringer of fine football, free of biters and divers.
He was surely the greatest.
