In May 1977 the team found out they had won promotion in mid-air when Brian Clough and Peter Taylor took them on an end-of-season trip to Majorca

After training, it was a greasy spoon called McKay’s where the players usually congregated. For beers, they would head to the King John, a hundred yards down the hill from Nottingham railway station, or maybe the Pepper Mill or Uriah Heeps if it was shaping up to be a proper night out. Yet the most popular meeting place was always McKay’s. It was there where the players put the world to rights, tucking into the kind of unpretentious grub that never seemed such a big deal in the days before football opened its doors to nutritionists and sports scientists and the strange new world of pasta, green-leaf salads and mineral water. “Fourteen chip cobs,” became such a regular order that the owner, Bill, had to get in extra supplies of bread and potatoes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest I Believe in Miracles by Daniel Taylor Photograph: PR

In the summer of 1977, there was a lot of conversation in that little cafe about what needed to be done to ensure Forest did not drop back into the Second Division. To put it bluntly, the players were apprehensive about what might happen now they were in the top league. Forest had sneaked up in third position with 52 points from 42 games, the fifth-lowest total of any promoted club in history. There might have been the occasional disagreement in McKay’s about whether it was a cob, a roll, a bun, a bap or, for a Mancunian such as Colin Barrett, a barm. But there was an acceptance over their steaming mugs of tea that the next step of the adventure would be a difficult one, and that there was a risk some of the players might be cut free.

Unseen Brian Clough – behind the scenes at Nottingham Forest Read more

Martin O’Neill had the occasional lapse into insecurity even during that week of celebrations by the hotel pool in Cala Millor, drinking beer out of plastic cups and listening to his Jethro Tull tape or the cassette John McGovern had brought with him of Fleetwood Mac’s latest album, Rumours. “There was euphoria,” O’Neill remembers. “It was congratulations all round. But then, of course, you spend the next few months worrying whether we are actually capable of playing in the higher league and whether we would even get the chance. Will it be too big for us? Will the step be enormous? We knew Brian Clough and Peter Taylor wouldn’t hang around and they would be bringing in some new players.”

Taylor had told the Nottingham Evening Post the team should be aiming high, and possibly even trying to qualify for Europe, but the players could probably be forgiven for thinking that was stretching the boundaries of credibility. Forest had never been higher than third and lost over a quarter of their games the previous season, beaten by Wolves (twice), Hull, Blackpool, Oldham, Charlton, Luton, Sheffield United, Chelsea and Cardiff, as well as what the club’s match-day programme called “the annual smash-and-grab raid by Notts County”. They had not beaten either of the two teams that had gone up ahead of them, and when it came to the betting-shop chalkboards they were nearer the bottom than the top. “We had got up by the skin of our teeth,” Larry Lloyd says. “You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to realise that team would not have survived and that Clough had to make some signings.”

Three arrived before October, including a goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, who gave the impression sometimes that if someone threw a handful of rice at his net he would keep out every single grain. The other two were Scots. One had more baggage than an airport carousel and the other was 5ft 4ins of pride, adrenaline and competitive courage. “A hooligan from Birmingham City called Kenny Burns and a little midfield nasty-man called Archie Gemmill”, to use Lloyd’s description. “Three world-class players; that was the point I started thinking maybe this guy Clough wanted to do something in this division.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Archie Gemmill, left, Martin O’Neill and John Robertson line up together for Nottingham Forest. Photograph: Colorsport/REX Shutterstock

Burns arrived first and, to put Lloyd’s words into context, even the club that was selling him told Clough he must be mad thinking he could tame the Glaswegian. Burns was notorious. He had committed one tackle in an Aston Villa–Birmingham derby that 30 years later made it into a feature in the Times about the 50 most X-rated challenges of all time. He spent his nights at the dog track and he was not even on speaking terms with some of his team-mates at St Andrew’s. “Don’t buy him,” Birmingham’s chairman, David Wiseman, warned Clough. “He’s trouble.”

Clough’s information was that Burns drove around in a battered Vauxhall Viva with no MOT or insurance (“Not true,” Burns always insisted). A picture developed of an untamed, hard-drinking pub-brawler. Clough didn’t want someone bringing bad headlines to the club and was so opposed to the idea it caused friction between him and Taylor. “Forget it,” Clough said when Taylor came up with the idea. “I don’t want troublemakers, I don’t want shit-houses and I don’t want an ugly bastard like Kenny Burns littering my club.”

But Taylor wouldn’t let it go. He had heard Burns was a stone overweight and losing money hand over fist to the bookmakers, but he still thought it was worth investigating and went incognito to the Perry Barr dog track to find out whether the gossip was true. “He didn’t recognise me in my disguise of flat cap and dark glasses,” Taylor later reported. “Nor did he realise that the punter so often at his shoulder as he placed a bet was Forest’s chief scout Maurice Edwards.”

Taylor’s report back to Clough was that it was moderate stuff – “tens and twenties, nothing higher” – and nothing they couldn’t handle. Birmingham accepted a £150,000 offer and Clough told Burns to have a shave, buy himself a decent coat and meet him the next day at a garden centre in Long Eaton, on the road from Nottingham to Derby.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kenny Burns’ signing was initially opposed by Brian Clough but Peter Taylor pressed ahead and the Birmingham striker was turned into a successful centre-half. Photograph: Colorsport/REX Shutterstock

When Burns turned up, he discovered they were naming some flowers after Clough at an exhibition of sweet peas. “I didn’t have a clue,” Burns says. “I thought we were going to look at some peas – as in, garden peas. I mean, peas are peas, aren’t they? Green things. What kind of peas are sweet peas? I know what green peas are. I know mushy peas. In Scotland, flowers are just things whose heads you kick off when you’ve had a few pints on a Saturday night.”

The horticultural lesson over, there was another surprise waiting for the man Clough insisted on calling “Kenneth”. Burns had scored 20 goals in 38 games the previous season as a centre-forward. Yet Clough, going by Taylor’s recommendation, had something different planned. “Perhaps it sounded insane to switch a goal-taker into defence, but there was good reason for our madness,” Taylor would later explain. “I suspected Burns didn’t relish life up front because the running didn’t suit his lazy nature. What’s more, we desperately needed a sweeper alongside Larry Lloyd and I visualised Kenny turning into a Scottish Bobby Moore. He was as skilful as Moore and certainly more ruthless.”

Nobody, however, had bothered to tell the man himself. “Peter Withe and Tony Woodcock thought I was being signed to take their place,” Burns says. “It was the trainer Jimmy Gordon who let me know. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘bibs on – Middleton, Anderson, Barrett, Lloyd, Burns, McGovern, O’Neill, Bowyer, Withe, Woodcock, Robertson.’ And that was it. That was the first I knew about the new partnership with big Larry.”

Forest had been dismissed as potential relegation candidates, or mid-table at best, in all the newspapers’ pre-season predictions. Liverpool had won the championship in three of the previous five seasons and finished second in the other two. Manchester City had a vibrant and thrilling side. Ipswich, managed by Bobby Robson, had finished third in two of the three previous years. Manchester United had Steve Coppell, Martin Buchan and Gordon Hill. These were the clubs that attracted all the column inches when it came to identifying who would fight it out for the championship.

Forest, in stark contrast, had scraped an unconvincing promotion and brought in only one player in the close season. The writers thought they lacked speed and finesse and would be overwhelmed in midfield where, as one scribe later put it, the popular belief was that “the names of Bowyer, McGovern and O’Neill were hardly likely to strike fear into the hearts of Case, McDermott, Kennedy and Dalglish”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brian Clough is the centre of attention as Forest record the song ‘We’ve Got the Whole World in our Hands’ en route to Birmingham in January 1978. Photograph: Brian Bould/ANL/REX Shutterstock

Forest were the nouveaux arrivés and in their first match, away at Everton, it was quiet on the bus going into Goodison Park. A letter had appeared in the Evening Post that day predicting “that Forest will come straight down, while Notts County clinch promotion”. The sign-off, “Faithful Magpie”, gave a clue as to the author’s loyalties, but the players on that bus were anticipating a long, hard slog. John Robertson was sitting beside O’Neill. “I was nervous as hell,” he remembers. “I think we all were.”

Taylor sensed it too and came into his own before kick-off with a 10-minute routine of jokes and anecdotes that worked wonders to change the mood. All the same, it was an intimidating place to start, with the Everton fans welcoming them on to the pitch with chants of “Lambs to the slaughter”. Woodcock remembers the noise when Everton ran out being “so loud you felt you almost had to duck down”. Forest played the first 20 minutes, according to O’Neill, “in our own penalty box”. Everton had reached the League Cup final the previous season as well as the FA Cup semi-finals. They were another team with title aspirations and the pressure on Forest’s goal was almost unremitting during the early exchanges. “I honestly thought this was really too much,” O’Neill says. “We couldn’t get a breather.” But the new defence held out. Burns had moved in seamlessly alongside Lloyd and, 20 minutes in, Forest broke out to win a corner. Robertson swung it over. The ball thudded off Withe’s forehead. Forest’s No9 had scored at the ground where he had once stood outside selling programmes – and the team had lift-off.

Dave Jones, Everton’s right-back, described what followed as the best performance from an away side he could remember at Goodison. Their captain, Mick Lyons, had written in the programme he had a strange feeling Forest might be “the surprise team of the season”, but the performance was a sensation. Duncan McKenzie, who had joined Everton the previous season, said he was amazed at how slick and efficient his old team were. Robertson doubled the lead with a shot into the top corner before Jim Pearson pulled one back just before half-time. O’Neill added Forest’s third in the second half and there could have been more.

Lloyd puffed out his chest and sucked in the air of the top division, where he had always thought he belonged. Burns passed his first real test with distinction. John McGovern thought he had done pretty well too, only to find out afterwards that Clough disagreed. “He started giving me the rollicking of my life in the dressing room,” McGovern recalls. “I’d gone forward too much for his liking and I’d had the temerity to think I might score and tried a couple of shots from just outside the penalty area. He was telling me I should have given it to somebody else – ‘Give it to a good player because a good player has a chance of scoring and you don’t’ – when someone started knocking on the door.

“That dressing room was usually sacrosanct. Clough wouldn’t even let in the chairman, but when he swung open the door his face changed. ‘Come in,’ he said, ‘delighted to see you.’ We couldn’t see who it was at first, but he said it like it must be the pope or the prime minister. ‘Bill, I’m just giving them a rollicking, telling them how poor they were, but I think you should do it.’ And it was Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool manager. Clough sat down with the rest of us and suddenly it was Shankly, this legend of the game, giving the team-talk for the next 15 minutes, with his hands in his pockets, in the classic gunslinger pose.”

That quarter of an hour gave the Forest players an insight into why Kevin Keegan once said of Shankly that “he made you feel any mountain could be climbed”. Keep your feet on the ground, was the crux of it, because there was still a hell of a way to go. But he also said there was no way Forest should undersell themselves if they could play that well and Clough was manager. “You can win it,” Shankly told them. “Don’t just be in the First Division, go and win it. Keep playing like that and you can win the championship.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brian Clough and Peter Taylor oversee the win over Derby that left Forest with the top division’s only 100% record after three matches. Photograph: Colorsport/REX Shutterstock

The media’s view was that a combination of Shankly, Clough, Jock Stein, Mario Zagallo and Rinus Michels might not be able to sustain that level of performance. Promoted teams often get off to a flier because of the momentum of the previous season, and the win was largely put down to a combination of adrenaline and beginners’ luck.

The following week the players in that shiny new kit – Garibaldi-red shirts, white shorts, three Adidas stripes on the sleeves – beat Bristol City courtesy of another goal from Withe. “Forest,” one report began, “may not have the players to reach the peaks of the First Division, but their attractive and intelligent football will give a great deal of pleasure.”

That was followed up with a resounding 3–0 win over Derby, in the first game pitting Clough and Taylor against their old club, with the television commentator Hugh Johns eulogising about “some of the most electrifying football I’ve seen for a long time”. In three games, Withe had scored four times. Forest were the only team with a 100% record and they were even more rampant in their next match, beating West Ham 5–0 in the League Cup.

The league table in August can always be a deception but to see Clough around this time, even just his walk to the dugout, was to see a man who seemed to believe a natural order had been restored.

Other managers would just get in the dugout without any fuss whatsoever. Clough made it an art form. He ambled: straight-backed, insouciant, mesmerising. Sometimes, if he was wearing a tie, he might tighten the knot. He would look over the perimeter wall, even at away matches, as if to check the crowd knew he was there. But they were already looking. Clough was not just telegenic, he had the ability to draw everyone’s attention and hold it. He was also back on top, which was just the way he liked it.

Extracted from I Believe In Miracles: The Remarkable Story of Brian Clough’s European Cup-winning Team (Headline £16.99)