QA: Larry Lloyd

Your autobiography, Hard Man: Hard Game, is out next month. Are there any hard men left in the modern game?

I am impressed with John Terry, I think he’s a very good defender. He does put in a tackle or two as far as they are allowed these days. Tackling, like heading, it’s a skill. They’re taking a vital skill that the crowd love out of the game: two honest footballers, 50-50, a good crunching tackle. My theory was: you can let the ball go past you, no problem. Let the player go past you, no problem. But don’t let them go past you together — one can’t score without the other.

What’s gone wrong at Liverpool?

People tell me you’ve got to rotate, it’s so different now. Well it’s not so different, I can tell you. The way football is these days, with the diets and regimes, I really can’t see the problem with playing two matches a week. One season with Nottingham Forest, we played 75 games and I played in 74 of them. Strikers in my day would have an animal like me or Tommy Smith or Kenny Burns kicking them from behind, which was allowed . . . well, it wasn’t allowed, but you could get away with it. Personally, if I was in a rotation system, I would go ape-s***. I want to play every game, I don’t want to sit on the bench. I’m big enough, strong enough, fit enough to play football twice a week and I want to. I don’t want to sit on my a***.

At least they’re doing better than they are at Nottingham Forest. You won two European Cups and the league at Forest, and look at them now.

I go on the internet, read the local rag, you get headlines like “Big game for Forest, must beat Doncaster”. Bloody Doncaster! Who the hell’s Doncaster? It should be “Big game for Forest: must beat Man United, must beat Chelsea, difficult away tie at Arsenal”, you know what I mean? All due respect to these clubs, they shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Forest.

What was it like playing for Brian Clough?

I smelt that this guy was a winner and he was going to help my career. He got a team together that was quite exceptional. As a man, though, we weren’t compatible, let’s put it that way. I didn’t like the way he talked to people at times — strangers. The way he talked to us, we had to put up with it because we were in his employ, but he came across as arrogant and very rude at times and he got away with murder sometimes, the way he spoke to people.

You played under Clough at Forest, Bob Paisley and Bill Shankly at Anfield and Sir Alf Ramsey picked you for England. Who was the best manager?

Shankly was all motivation, shouting, bawling and winding you up, but you just wanted to play for the man. Paisley was more quiet, more studious, more thoughtful. Clough, he was a great motivator as well. To answer your question, I suppose Clough because he did it with two small-city clubs, Derby and Nottingham. Back-to-back European Cups? Manchester United can’t do that. Nobody can tell me it was easy in those days because it bloody wasn’t. Clough was an absolute genius of a manager.

Interview by Tom Dart

Comments

[Es Heffernan]

Hi Larry really enjoying the book hope to see you soon Es