Certainly a one-off – Viv Anderson recalls special times under Brian Clough

When new Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough burst into the dressing room and promptly pinned up his first team sheet, defender Viv Anderson thought his own days at the club were numbered.

Little did the teenager looking to break into the side know it then, but under Clough’s guidance Anderson would go on to win the First Division title and lift the European Cup twice as well as play for England.

Clough, who died aged 69 on September 20 2004, was appointed Forest boss in January 1975 – soon back in the game following his ill-fated 44-day tenure at Leeds.

Sharp-witted and forthright, Middlesbrough-born ‘Old Big Head’ Clough continued to rub plenty of people up the wrong way as he transformed Forest’s fortunes – just as he had done when taking Derby from the Second Division to become League champions in 1972.

There was, though, no denying Clough’s knack of wringing every ounce of ability out of his players along the way.

Having been released as a schoolboy by Manchester United, Anderson returned home to Nottingham and was given his opportunity at Forest by Allan Brown.

But the dramatic arrival of Clough left Anderson far from certain of just when he would get a game again.

“I had played on the Saturday against Tottenham in the FA Cup and came off with 10 minutes to go with cramp,” Anderson told the PA news agency.

“But when he (Clough) burst into the room saying, ‘I am the new Nottingham Forest manager and the travelling team for the replay is pinned up on the board’, I wasn’t on it.

“I am thinking, ‘Well, he doesn’t fancy me, so the writing is on the wall here’.

“I was a young lad getting in the team and it was just a shock that I had played on the Saturday, but then I wasn’t involved in the replay on the Wednesday – because it was only cramp!”

Anderson, however, went on to become a regular in Clough’s side, the right-back eventually making more than 300 appearances for Forest before he left to join Arsenal in the summer of 1984.

“He had a nucleus of decent players and very good professionals,” Anderson said.

“He could instil the right attitudes and the right virtues into the younger players, then he bought the likes of Frank Clark, Colin Barrett, Larry Lloyd and Peter Shilton, a lot of experienced players to help us young lads get through.

“We never followed strict regimes in training. It was like a bit of five-a-side and then go out and play matches whenever it was.

“But the group of players knew what they had to do to reach the expectations of the manager.”

Anderson recalled: “He was very unpredictable, you never knew from one minute to the next what he was going to do.

“But it kept you on your toes, he was very fair and at the end of the day, you wanted to please him.

“Larry Lloyd always used to say, ‘If you got a thumbs up from the manager, then you know you have done well’.

“Kenny Burns would get them – but I had never got one, then finally I got one and I was absolutely chuffed.”

Anderson, who later played under Sir Alex Ferguson at United, believes Clough was also very much ahead of his time as a coach.

“In the 1980 European Cup final against Hamburg, we played five in midfield, with young Gary Mills out wide and Garry Birtles playing up front on his own,” Anderson said.

“Then about 10 years afterwards, people started to adapt that system, so he was really forward-thinking in his views and was certainly a one-off.”