Be Good, Colin Yates!

So where is he? That’s what everyone’s been asking this week. The LMA have only gone and commissioned a print recognizing the fifty greatest contributors to English football management throughout the last century, and the artist – Colin Yates – has only gone and forgotten Him. A man of substance and character, a gritty autocrat who bestrode, bedevilled, bewitched the game with a bloody-minded commitment to his own methods, a man who swept a team to glory on the back of a steely defence and a magical, portly left winger. And it gets worse. Not only has he forgotten Colin Calderwood… there’s no Brian Clough either.

Art is of course a very subjective thing; even if you’re of the opinion that Mr. Yates’ collage resembles the patchwork efforts of a young boy setting feverishly about Shoot! with a pair safety scissors, the point is moot. The briefest of strolls about the Tate Modern will reveal the kind of slapdash chancing that can be passed off as Art these days. And also, it’s for charity, which gives these kinds of things a bullet-proof insurance against public opinion. “Do something yourself, then, if you’re that bloody clever” mutters the chairman of Speed Eaters Against Spastic Colons. Fair dues. I just imagined, as a traditionalist, that the criteria – nay, credibility – for this kind of thing would hinge around collecting together the true glitterati of British football management. And not, you know, Paul Ince.

Granted, no one at the LMA actually made ‘Football Management: Past, Present and Future’, but where’s a bit of Stalinist intervention when you need it? Clough’s omission is a point of staggering ignorance. It might not have been Richard Bevan or Howard Wilkinson with the PVA glue, but we’re talking about the organisation representative of English football league managers. Of which, memory dictates, Brian Clough was a rather successful one. Perhaps even more so than Alan Pardew, who’s captured here in frame 27 celebrating a goal during his reign as Charlton manager. A picture that was presumably taken from that harmonious season in 07/08, sandwiched as it was between two Alan-inspired relegations. And Tommy Docherty? Apparently a career failurist and perjurer warrants inclusion above and beyond Mr. Clough, too.

You can’t even argue ignorance on the artist’s part, because to include the likes of Gradi, Wright and Hogan suggests a halfway rounded grasp of the subject matter. But come on, this is not one of those wanky Channel 4 Top-100s that swallow up whole evenings with unemployed actors arguing about the best Beatles album. Achievements are inked intractably into history and used to judge, value, assess. The litany of great British managers is largely unanimous: Clough, Shankley, Paisley, Fagan, Ferguson, Chapman, Mee. Cullis. Nicholson and Revie. Sir Alf Ramsey. Yates’ piece reads like the ‘bands’ list on a teenage boy’s Facebook page, massaged for credibility, an exercise in the purposefully abstract. Between the tokenism (Hope Powell), the populism (Phil Brown), and the downright bizarre (Gary McAllister), it’s truly remarkable that Clough was allowed to go, again, unrecognized. Perhaps the man’s long, long shadow continues to menace those stuffy bureaucrats at the administrative end of English football.

He was no angel, Brian, and the posthumous romancing of his life and times can get a little wearisome. What he was, indisputably, was a football genius, a timeless, peerless gift to the game: in the words of the LMA’s own website, “it would be fair to say that English football had never seen a manager quite like Brian Clough, and fairer still to assume that it is unlikely to see another like him again.”