I Believe in Miracles

A new movie (and book) is about to premiere about Brian Clough and how he made Nottingham Forest European Cup Champions twice in a row. Sounds like a movie for all fans of the great man and for those who love football fairytales.

The Guardian article below, with an interesting insight into Jose Mourinho, is quite long and has a video preview of the movie, so was too difficult to copy and paste, but this bit gives a little taste of it. I never realised just WHAT an achievement it all was but my excuse is I lived in the USA 1975 - 1981 so missed it all! I will definitely be going to see this as soon as I can and the book will be on my Christmas list.

The film premieres on Sunday night at the City Ground and, to put the story into perspective, perhaps the best place to start is to imagine Huddersfield Town, 13th in the Championship last season, winning promotion next May, then the Premier League at the first attempt, back-to-back Champions Leagues, a couple of Capital One 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.

Forest were that team: 13th in the old Division Two when Clough landed his coat on the peg for the first time, on 6 January 1975. They did all the above within five years, as well as knocking Liverpool, the double European Cup winners, off their perch, long before Sir Alex Ferguson coined the phrase. They did it with five players – 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. Another trophy was added to the collection and when they left the stadium that night there was a mob waiting outside. “Two rows of Barcelona fans, eight deep, all the way from the exit to our coach,” John McGovern, the captain, recalls. “They were all very quiet and I thought: ‘We could be in trouble here.’ It was then they started clapping. As we walked to our coach they clapped us all the way. Not a Forest fan in sight, all Barcelona fans. Clapping us out of their own stadium.”

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