![]() Nottingham Forest S V Hamburg European Cup Final 1980. 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 Bristol Rovers, twice, before Peter Taylor joined Clough’s side and everything suddenly clicked with a team one newspaper described as “a mix of fresh and well-worn faces who ought to be slogging it out at the bottom of the table”. The story will never happen again but, equally, it had never happened before either. Not a Forest fan in sight, all Barcelona fans. As we walked to our coach they clapped us all the way. “They were all very quiet and I thought: ‘We could be in trouble here.’ It was then they started clapping. “Two rows of Barcelona fans, eight deep, all the way from the exit to our coach,” John McGovern, the captain, recalls. Another trophy was added to the collection and when Clough's victorious players left the stadium that night there was a mob waiting outside. They did it with five players – Viv 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. Pic via Mirrorpix.įorest were that team: they did all the above as well as knocking Liverpool, the double European Cup winners, off their perch, long before Sir Alex Ferguson coined the phrase. ![]() What happened over the following five years is nothing short of a miracle and, to put the story into perspective, just try to imagine Preston North End, currently 13th in the Championship, winning promotion next May, then the Premier League at the first attempt, back-to-back Champions Leagues, a couple of EFL 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.īrian Clough football manager celebrating after his Nottingham Forest team had beaten Hamburg to win the 1980 European Cup. “You'll never achieve anything there,” were his precise words. One of their own committee members had described them as “the least progressive club in the country” and one of the previous managers, Dave Mackay, had warned off Clough. Perhaps the best way to sum up the almost implausible journey that finished with unfashionable, unheralded Nottingham Forest winning the European Cup, twice, is to think back to what the club were like before a certain Yorkshireman with a wagging finger, a nasal accent and a habit of kissing television interviewers sprinkled his precious magic on the club.įorest were 13th in the old Division Two when Brian Clough landed his coat on the peg for the first time on a freezing January morning in 1975. The Forest team celebrate with the trophy after the match. 1980 European Cup Final at the Santiagio Bernabeu Stadium in Madrid.
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