Looking for the Toffees by Brian Viner

Author:Brian Viner [Viner, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471131721
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter Fourteen

In August 1977 came the start of the first full season at Everton for both Pejic and Lee, and with it, a coach carrying the Nottingham Forest team. Jonathan Wilson, in his magisterial biography of Clough, Nobody Ever Says Thank You, writes that there were considerable pre-match nerves in the away dressing room. Liverpool’s success might have cast a giant shadow across Stanley Park, but Everton were still regarded as serious title challengers, and Goodison Park was an even more intimidating place to visit then than it is now. Especially, for all their promise, by players just promoted from the Second Division.

Martin O’Neill told Wilson that as they waited for kick-off, he and his teammates ‘felt about two-feet tall’. But then Peter Taylor came in, and for ten whole minutes basically performed a comedy routine, telling jokes and stories so funny that many of the players were still chuckling as they stepped on to the Goodison turf. It was a deliberate tactic, endorsed by Clough, who later wrote in one of his own books: ‘I would far rather have my players rolling about the dressing room floor laughing than have them trying to fathom a list of instructions and tactics before they went out and played a match.’

That wasn’t how it was across the corridor. Lee was by no means as dour as he looked, but he was no Les Dawson. Besides, he had no need to quell any nerves, with or without jokes. Even with Latchford suspended, Forest were surely there for the taking.

What followed, instead, was the taking of Everton 1-2-3. But the home team’s frailties at the back were such that the Guardian ’s correspondent, for one, felt that the game offered no great insight into Forest as an attacking force. ‘Brian Clough is quite a subdued fellow these days,’ went the report in Monday’s paper. ‘The Nottingham Forest manager did not get carried away by his team’s demonstration of their abilities on their return to the First Division after five years, and neither should anyone else. One cannot go overboard yet . they have the element of surprise at the moment. However, the skills of players such as Tony Woodcock and John Robertson are quickly going to be recognised by more competent defenders than those on display at Goodison Park. When that happens, Forest should be prepared for hard times.’

It was a singularly unprescient report, the predicted hard times amounting to a league title, followed by a European Cup, and then another European Cup. But it probably wasn’t wide of the mark in implying Everton’s incompetence in defence that day. Pejic, with that enviable talent many ex-footballers have for remembering the good performances and blotting out the bad, had no particular recollection of the game at all. But he certainly remembered having to deal with Forest’s coltishly leggy, marauding right back, Viv Anderson.

The following year, two days before his twenty-second birthday, Anderson would become the first black footballer to play for England. Laurie Cunningham had

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