Brian Clough is the name on the statue, on the stand and on the road signs. But the man who built Nottingham Forest’s greatest side never worked alone, and he said so himself, repeatedly and loudly, right up until the day the partnership broke. Peter Taylor Nottingham Forest is the other half of the story — the scout, the judge of players and the foil whose eye for a footballer turned a mid-table Second Division club into champions of Europe inside three years.
Who was Peter Taylor?
Peter Thomas Taylor was born in Nottingham on 2 July 1928 and made his living as a goalkeeper, playing for Coventry City, Middlesbrough and Port Vale. He was a competent professional rather than a great one, and by his own reckoning that was rather the point: he spent his playing years watching other people closely and working out what made a footballer good.
It was at Middlesbrough in the mid-1950s that he met a young, abrasive, prolific centre-forward called Brian Clough. Taylor was one of the very few people in that dressing room who thought Clough was as good as Clough thought he was. The friendship that followed became the most successful double act English football has produced.
They went into management together at Hartlepools United in 1965, then moved to Derby County in 1967, where they won the Second Division in 1969 and the First Division title in 1972. They resigned at Derby in 1973 and took over at Brighton & Hove Albion. When Clough left for his ill-fated 44 days at Leeds United in 1974, Taylor stayed behind on the south coast — the one spell in which the two men worked apart, and, not coincidentally, the least successful period of either man’s career.
The Peter Taylor Nottingham Forest years: July 1976 onwards
Clough had arrived at the City Ground in January 1975 and spent 18 months trying to lift a Second Division side on his own. Taylor joined him in July 1976. What happened next is set out in full in our account of Clough’s time at Nottingham Forest, and the timeline barely looks real:
- 1976/77: promoted from the Second Division in third place
- 1977/78: First Division champions at the first attempt, plus the League Cup
- 1978/79: League Cup retained, European Cup won in Munich
- 1979/80: European Cup retained in Madrid
The division of labour was never precisely documented, because neither man was much interested in documenting it, but the shape of it is well understood. Clough set the standards, handled the players and supplied the theatre. Taylor found the footballers, assessed the ones already at the club, and told Clough the things nobody else at Forest would dare say to him.
The signings that won two European Cups
Taylor’s contribution shows up most clearly in the recruitment. Forest did not win the 1978 title by outspending the division; they won it with a squad assembled largely from other clubs’ rejects, misfits and unfashionable names, and the judgement behind that was overwhelmingly Taylor’s.
Kenny Burns arrived from Birmingham City with a reputation as an unmanageable forward and was converted into a centre-half who won the Football Writers’ Footballer of the Year award in his first season. Larry Lloyd came in from Coventry City having drifted out of the game’s front rank. John Robertson was already at the club, unfit and unloved, before he was rebuilt into the best left-sided player in Europe. John McGovern and Archie Gemmill were players Clough and Taylor already knew and trusted from Derby.
Then came the two decisions that turned a good side into a European one: Peter Shilton, signed for a fee that was extraordinary for a goalkeeper at the time, and Trevor Francis, English football’s first £1m player. Francis scored the goal that beat Malmo in 1979; Robertson scored the goal that beat Hamburg in 1980. Both finals are covered in our piece on the 1979 and 1980 European Cups, and the league form that underpinned them in our account of the 42-game unbeaten run.
Why the partnership ended
Taylor retired from Forest in May 1982, citing exhaustion. The team had already begun to come apart — the European Cup winners were ageing out, and the money to replace them properly was not there.
The retirement did not last. In November 1982 Taylor took the manager’s job at Derby County, by then in the Second Division, without telling Clough he was considering it. In January 1983 the two clubs were drawn together in the FA Cup third round and Taylor’s Derby beat Clough’s Forest 2–0 at the Baseball Ground, a result that still colours the East Midlands rivalry.
The final breach came that summer, when Derby signed John Robertson from Forest and Clough learned about it from outside the deal. He regarded it as a betrayal by the one person he had never expected to be betrayed by, and the two men did not speak again. Taylor died on 4 October 1990, aged 62, while on holiday in Majorca. By every account of those who were around him, Clough never got over the fact that the argument had been left unfinished, and he dedicated his autobiography to Taylor in terms that made the regret plain.
How Taylor is remembered
For years the recognition was lopsided. Clough has a statue in Nottingham city centre, a stand at the City Ground and the A52 between Nottingham and Derby named after him; Taylor, for a long time, had comparatively little. That was corrected in 2010, when a statue of the two men together — side by side, as they worked — was unveiled in Derby, and his role has been steadily restored in the accounts written since.
The honours the partnership delivered are listed in full in our guide to Nottingham Forest’s trophies, and the players Taylor identified fill most of our all-time Forest XI.
The modern game has caught up with the idea. Oliver Glasner runs the current Reds with a full staff of specialist coaches and a recruitment department behind him, and no head coach in the Premier League would now be expected to find and assess players on his own. Forest worked that out in 1976, with a staff of two.
European Cup final records are held by UEFA, English league records by the English Football League, and club history on the official Nottingham Forest website.
