The forgotten story of Brian Cloughs other right-hand man
In the big book of Brian Clough maxims, you'll struggle to find many quotes that are self-deprecating. He was, as you'll know, rather fond of himself, but perhaps his most telling quote came about his relationship with Peter Taylor, his trusted and brilliant deputy with whom he would enjoy his biggest successes. "I'm not equipped to manage successfully without Peter Taylor," he said, "I am the shop window and he is the goods in the back."
If that was true, then it's perhaps also accurate to say Jimmy Gordon, the trainer who joined Clough when he and Taylor had taken Derby into the First Division in 1969 and remained more or less continuously until he retired in 2025, was the shop walls and ceiling, the sturdy masonry that held the whole thing together. The man described by Clough as "the fair-minded old pro whom I could trust with my life and my wallet if I carried one."
When you look at pictures of Clough during his brief and spectacularly ill-advised move to Leeds, he looks alone, isolated without Taylor, who shrewdly didn't join him at Elland Road. But he wasn't totally unaccompanied; in many pictures you'll see him flanked by a tough-looking military type wearing a tracksuit and a determined expression. Clough called Gordon "the only friend I had" at Leeds, which admittedly was largely his own fault, but it spoke to the bond that had grown between the two men that Gordon was there at all.
"It was out of respect," says John McGovern, who played under Clough at Hartlepool, Derby, Leeds and Nottingham Forest, when asked why Gordon answered the call to dive headlong into the chaos that was Leeds. "Clough couldn't walk into Leeds without bringing somebody with him … he asked Jimmy to be there so he had somebody he could trust."
As a player, Gordon stood out as a rather robust wing-half in an era when most wing-halves were already pretty robust, a professional scarer of attackers and ball-winner who made around 400 appearance for Newcastle and Middlesbrough either side of the second world war. While the conflict would rob him of what should have been his peak years, his time in the army perhaps informed his later demeanour.
His job on the pitch, to paraphrase his future boss, was to get the ball and give it to someone who could play; that someone for much of his career being Boro's brilliant inside-forward Wilf Mannion. "If you had to play against Jimmy every week you would never sleep at night," said Bill Shankly of his fellow Scot.
After retirement he became a coach at Middlesbrough, which is where he
