As a new film is released, Daniel Taylor, with help from José Mourinho, relives the remarkable story of how Brian Clough turned a struggling Second Division side into European champions – twice

“We were like one of those comets you see flying across the night sky. We burned brightly, but it was all too brief. But, boy, did we burn brightly for a while.” – John McGovern

Of all the moments of television gold featuring Brian Clough in his absolute pomp, perhaps the best known one other than that exceptional mano-a-mano with Don Revie is the time a young John Motson is in the interviewer’s chair. You may have seen the footage: Motson, with a kipper tie and unfathomably large hair, and the tiny waver in his voice when he sets off with a slightly rambling first question. And Clough: straight-backed, telegenic, sitting there like the emperor of Yorkshire. “There’s a lot of questions all in there, John,” he says, with that glint of supremacy in his eye. “And, by the sound of your voice, you’re just about getting them out.”

That clip was on José Mourinho’s phone when we met a few weeks ago, behind the fingerprint-recognition system that buzzes visitors through Chelsea’s training ground, and the manager of the reigning champions started to reel off some of his favourite Cloughisms.

Mourinho’s office is upstairs at Cobham and it is important to keep a straight face when there are two life-sized cardboard cutouts to negotiate even before the real-life version comes into view behind his desk. The walls are lined with dozens of framed Mourinho photographs. The coffee table is stacked neatly with Mourinho biographies and picture books, in various languages, and it is almost a surprise when a cup of tea is brought out that it is not a Mourinho mug.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brian Clough took over at Nottingham Forest in 1975 when they were struggling in the old Division Two. Within five years they had won the Division One title and the European Cup twice. He is pictured with the 1980 Cup, their second. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty

Yet, on this day, we are talking about another team, another man’s ego and achievements, and I Believe in Miracles, the film charting the almost implausible journey that finished with unfashionable, unheralded Nottingham Forest winning the European Cup, twice.

New Brian Clough film might interest Manchester United | Richard Williams Read more

Mourinho was 16 when Trevor Francis landed on the shot-putters’ circle at the Olympiastadion, Munich, after the decisive header to win the trophy in 1979, and 17 when Forest repeated the trick a year later on a sweet-scented night at the Bernabéu. He remembers all the players, the finals, the look – red shirt, white shorts, three Adidas stripes – and, typically, even the small tactical details, such as the way Viv Anderson had carte blanche to stride forward in a way that was unheard of for right-backs of that era.

He has been to Nottingham to get to know more about the city and the footage on his phone makes Mourinho laugh when, goodness knows, there hasn’t been a great deal of laughter at Chelsea recently. “The interviewer doesn’t stand a chance,” he says. “He [Clough] is enjoying himself. Ping! Ping! Ping!”

Mourinho’s favourite quote? That was when a colleague walked into Clough’s office to find him listening to his favourite singer. “Did you know,” Clough asked, “Sinatra met me once?” Clough was calling himself Old Big ’Ead when Mourinho was at his most impressionable age. It is no wonder he thinks they would have got on and Clough, one imagines, would like the fact Chelsea’s manager is writing the foreword for the book that accompanies the film. “I like the look of Mourinho,” he observed before his 2004 death, “there is a touch of the young Clough about him.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brian Clough and Peter Taylor during Nottingham Forest’s European Cup semi-final in 1979 against Cologne. Photograph: Popperfoto

The film premieres on Sunday night at the City Ground and, to put the story into perspective, perhaps the best place to start is to imagine Huddersfield Town, 13th in the Championship last season, winning promotion next May, then the Premier League at the first attempt, back-to-back Champions Leagues, a couple of Capital One Cups and creating a record for going unbeaten in the top division – 42 matches in Forest’s case – that would last a quarter of a century.

Forest were that team: 13th in the old Division Two when Clough landed his coat on the peg for the first time, on 6 January 1975. They did all the above within five years, as well as knocking Liverpool, the double European Cup winners, off their perch, long before Sir Alex Ferguson coined the phrase. They did it with five players – Anderson, Martin O’Neill, Ian Bowyer, Tony Woodcock and John Robertson – who were there from the start and the journey took them from five points off the relegation places into Division Three, with sub-8,000 gates, to Camp Nou, taking on Barcelona for the Super Cup. Another trophy was added to the collection and when they left the stadium that night there was a mob waiting outside. “Two rows of Barcelona fans, eight deep, all the way from the exit to our coach,” John McGovern, the captain, recalls. “They were all very quiet and I thought: ‘We could be in trouble here.’ It was then they started clapping. As we walked to our coach they clapped us all the way. Not a Forest fan in sight, all Barcelona fans. Clapping us out of their own stadium.”

The story will never happen again but, equally, it had never happened before either. People forget that Forest went up with 52 points, the fifth-lowest of any promoted team in history, and that they lost to York, Peterborough and, twice, Bristol Rovers before Peter Taylor joined Clough’s side and everything suddenly clicked with a team described in one newspaper as “a mix of fresh and well-worn faces who ought to be slogging it out at the bottom of the table”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trevor Francis, England’s first £1m player. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Kenny Burns had a reputation at Birmingham City as an untamed, hard-drinking pub-brawler until Forest’s management duo converted him from a marauding centre-forward into what Taylor described as the Scottish Bobby Moore. “Don’t buy him,” Birmingham’s chairman, David Wiseman, had warned Clough, “he’s trouble.” Larry Lloyd’s signing-on fee was a washing machine Clough pinched from the laundry department. Frank Clark was a free transfer from Newcastle, on the verge of signing for Fourth Division Doncaster Rovers. Robertson, with his chip-fat grin and nicotine-laced chuckle, was drifting so badly Clough’s predecessor, Allan Brown, tried to offload him to Partick Thistle. Peter Shilton arrived as the most expensive goalkeeper in the league and Francis later became the first £1m man, but it was an unlikely assortment of free transfers, bargain buys, rogues and misfits, all turning out to be exceptionally gifted footballers. They piggy-backed through nettles and played hide-and-seek in what passed as training sessions. They held team meetings at a greasy-spoon cafe called McKay’s, where the standard order of 14 chip cobs meant the owner, Bill, had to order more supplies of bread and potatoes. And, against every conceivable expectation, they produced a story that will never be replicated.

Garry Birtles was a £2,000 signing from Long Eaton United working as a carpet-fitter and doubling up in Nottingham’s Sunday alehouse leagues with Long Eaton Rovers until Clough and Taylor turned him into the European young player of the year. Birtles’s amateur career ended against a team called Clumber Kitchens and Bathrooms amid the stale beer fumes of Victoria Embankment, Nottingham’s equivalent of Hackney Marshes. His first goal for his hometown club helped knock Liverpool out of the European Cup and when Forest brought the trophy back to the Old Market Square he was presented with a special award from Roy of the Rovers magazine. “Every time I watch Liverpool now I look for the flags on the Kop because there’s a two-year gap in the dates. They go from ’77 and ’78 to ’81. And I always think: ‘That’s us, that gap. We did that.’”

This was the team that prepared for a European Cup semi-final against the great Ajax side by walking round the red-light district of Amsterdam, settling down for some late-night beers in a bar full of potheads and sex tourists. Shilton’s training for the final took place on the roundabout of a dual-carriageway, surrounded by cars tooting their horns, because it was the only piece of grass he could find in their Spanish resort. And the film doesn’t stray from the five-year period, as the director Jonny Owen explains, when “Clough was peerless,” kicking off with that stunning piece of television, Goodbye Mr Clough, on the night he was sacked at Leeds, when his verbal jousting with a flint-faced Revie concludes with the presenter, Austin Mitchell, laying it on the table. “What’s going to happen to Brian Clough now?” he asks. “Who’s going to touch you with a bargepole?”

When Forest took the punt four months later the club were so skint they held a cheese and wine event to raise a few quid in his first summer. The training ground was a squelchy piece of public grass beside the Trent, long before the days when dog-walkers bothered with poop bags, and at least one player used a Shipstone’s Brown Ales beermat as a tax disc. In keeping with the decade, some of their best moments came on muddy, wet-weekend-at-Glastonbury pitches where the players might have been at risk of trench foot. Yet Forest, at their peak, passed the ball as though they were playing on a bowling green and, if there is any justice, the spotlight will shine more brightly now on those players who have always felt they did not get the recognition they deserved.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Nottingham Forest team with the European Cup after their 1-0 victory over Malmo 1979. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Bob Wilson, in his early days as a BBC pundit, said the “bubble would burst”. It turned out the bubble was made of something more substantial than soap and water, but even when Forest won their first European Cup the team award in the 1979 BBC Sports Personality of the Year show went to the British show-jumpers (“four effing horses,” as Forest’s secretary, Ken Smales, was heard to exclaim).

Equally, just consider the six teams in the hall of fame at the National Football Museum. Manchester United’s European Cup winners from 1968 are honoured, as are the Busby Babes of the 1950s. The Liverpool team of 1978 have been inducted, along with England’s 1966 World Cup winners, Preston’s Invincibles and the Manchester City side that won the league, the FA Cup and European Cup-Winners’ Cup from 1968 to 1970. Only teams that played over 25 years ago can be nominated. Aston Villa, European Cup winners in 1982, are the sixth and, in all those cases, nobody could possibly argue it was undeserved.

There is, however, one notable exception and, having spent time with the relevant players in the process of the book-writing, it is clearly a source of irritation that they are remembered as what Robertson calls a “rag-tag and bobtail outfit”.

Robertson is the case in point. “When I try to tell people how good he was it can be difficult because it was over 30 years ago,” McGovern says. “So what I generally say is: ‘You know a few years ago there was a guy called Ryan Giggs who played until he was 40 and was regarded as one of the best left-wingers of all time? Well, John Robertson was like Ryan Giggs but with two good feet, not one.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nottingham Forest’s John Robertson shoots to score the winning goal in the 1980 European Cup final against Hamburg. Photograph: Bob Thomas/popperfoto.com

Robertson left his fingerprints all over two European Cup finals – scoring the winner against Hamburg and setting up Francis against Malmo. Clough called him “the Picasso of our game” and Forest’s trainer Jimmy Gordon – old-school tracksuit, silver hair, Brylcreem, whistle round his neck – once paid him an even higher compliment. “I saw a lot of Tom Finney and Stan Matthews in my time and it was very difficult to choose between the two. But when you look at what Finney and Matthews had to offer, John had a bit of both – and something extra on top.”

That Robertson is not widely remembered outside Nottingham, and perhaps Merseyside, as one of the all-time greats is an anomaly that stems, in part, from the way everyone was fixated on the walking ego in the dugout with the green sweatshirt and shiny, thick hair.

“Who is this McGovern?’ Günter Netzer, the German midfield legend, asked after Forest had knocked Cologne, the Bundesliga champions, out of the 1979 semi-final. “I have never heard of him, yet he ran the game.”

Then there was the chief football correspondent from the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf who interviewed Shilton after the same game and told Forest’s goalkeeper: “Out of your entire team, your name is the only one that is familiar to me.”

“Well, you’ll know us all now,” Shilton replied.

The legacy, 35 years on, is that Nottingham has won the competition more times than London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Rome altogether. It took Manchester United 31 years to win the European Cup for a second time and it was not until 2012 that Chelsea finally notched up one for London. And the world sees Sherwood Forest county differently because of it. “All of a sudden, Nottingham didn’t just have Robin Hood,” McGovern says. “We had Robin Hood, Brian Clough and Nottingham Forest.”

Mourinho spoke with great warmth, describing Clough as “this super profile, like he is Prime Minister”, and the book is released next month, on the coat-tails of what Irvine Welsh reckons is the “best film about football you will ever see”. All the boys of 1979 and 1980 will be at the premiere – along with 3,500 ticket-holders – apart from O’Neill, who is away with Republic of Ireland and not tempted to emulate Clough (who often deserted Forest to take a mid-season holiday).

The various Clough and Taylor children and grandchildren will also be there, in the ground where there are stands named after both men. The last film about Clough, The Damned United, caused the relatives great distress on the basis, as Nigel bluntly puts it, it was “full of shit, not artistic licence”.

For this one, Owen brought them together for a private showing that was emotional for everyone. “The beauty of this story is that it’s told by the people who were there,” Nigel says. “They know what Forest were in 1975 and they know what they were five years later, and they were part of that story.”

I Believe in Miracles tells it beautifully and is in the cinemas, nationwide, from Tuesday. I wouldn’t say it was the movie event of the year, but it is in the top one.

• I Believe In Miracles is released on Tuesday. An accompanying book of the same name, written by Daniel Taylor with a foreword by José Mourinho, will be published on 12 November

The glory years

6 Jan 1975 Brian Clough, out of work since being sacked by Leeds United on 12 Sept 1974, replaces Allan Brown as Nottingham Forest manager with the side 13th in the old Second Division.

May 1975 Forest finish season in 16th.

1975-76 Finish eighth in first full season.

16 Jul 1976 Clough brings in Peter Taylor, previously his No2 at Derby, from Brighton as assistant.

1976-77 First trophy – Forest win the Anglo-Scottish Cup, beating Leyton Orient 5-1 on aggregate in the final. Promoted in third place with modest tally of 52 points.

Dec 1977 Clough is interviewed for England manager’s position. Ron Greenwood gets the job.

1977-78 Forest win the League Cup, defeating Bob Paisley’s Liverpool 1-0 in a replay at Old Trafford after a 0-0 draw at Wembley. They go on to win the club’s first ever League title, finishing seven points ahead of Liverpool.

1978-79 Start season by winning Charity Shield with a record 5-0 win over Ipswich. Forest’s remarkable 42-match unbeaten league run dating back to 26 Nov 1977 is extended until a 2-0 defeat at Liverpool on 9 Dec 1978. Clough breaks British transfer record in signing Trevor Francis for £1m from Birmingham City on 9 Feb. Forest retain League Cup with 3-2 win over Southampton. Finish league runners-up to Liverpool by eight points. Win European Cup by beating Liverpool, AEK Athens, Grasshopper Zurich and Cologne before Francis scores the winner in a 1-0 win over Malmo in the Munich final.

1979-80 Win European Super Cup with two-leg win over Barcelona in Jan-Feb 1980. Reach third consecutive League Cup final but lose 1-0 to Wolves. Retain European Cup by beating Oesters, Arges Pitesti, Dynamo Berlin and Ajax before John Robertson’s goal secures a 1-0 final win over Hamburg in Madrid.

This article was amended on Saturday 10 October to correct the name of De Telegraaf