Derby County and Nottingham Forest are divided by the A52 and joined by Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, who won the league with both and fell out over a left-winger. A wry, warm history of the East Midlands derby, from the Baseball Ground to an autumn of 2026 when both clubs are looking nervously at the trapdoor.
Most rivalries are about difference. This one is about a family resemblance. Derby County and Nottingham Forest are two old East Midlands clubs whose supporters spend a good deal of time on the A52 between them, and whose greatest days were organised by the same two men. Brian Clough and Peter Taylor won the league at Derby in 1972, walked out the next year, and then won it again at Forest in 1978, with the European Cup in 1979 and 1980 for good measure. Fans of both clubs are fiercely proud of them. The only thing they really disagree about is which club the men loved more, and since both men are dead, nobody is going to win that one either.
The old version of this piece told the story with a lot of affection and a fair number of dates that didn’t quite line up. I’ve rebuilt it from sources I could read, and where the sources disagree I’ve said so. You’ll find that they disagree, rather fittingly, about Peter Taylor.
Two men and a reserve goalkeeper
The partnership began long before either club came into it. In his Guardian obituary of Clough, Brian Glanville points out that when Clough came back to Middlesbrough after RAF service he was “scarcely a third choice centre-forward”, and that it was Taylor, then a reserve goalkeeper, “who saw his potential, trumpeted his virtues, and promoted his career”. Clough went on to score 204 second division goals in 222 games for Middlesbrough. His playing career ended on Boxing Day 1962, at Sunderland, when he was 27 and a collision with Bury’s goalkeeper tore a cruciate ligament. In 1965 he became manager of Hartlepools, and Taylor left his job at Burton Albion to join him.
In 1967 the two were appointed to run Derby, then in the Second Division. Glanville credits them with “enormous flair in the transfer market”, picking up future stars such as Roy McFarland and Archie Gemmill for small fees, and in 1972 Derby were champions of England. It’s worth stopping on that. A club that had been in the Second Division in 1967 won the title, and the following season reached the European Cup semi-finals, where they lost to Juventus. Clough’s verdict on the Italian press after the Turin leg can’t be printed here, and Glanville, who was standing next to him, was then asked to translate it.
The trouble started inside the partnership. According to the obituary, Taylor was “enraged” to find that Clough had been given a £5,000 pay rise without his knowledge, “and things would never be the same”. In October 1973 Clough fell out “irreparably” with the Derby chairman, Sam Longson, and both men resigned. There were impassioned protest meetings in the town and they didn’t come back. The obituary’s image for what followed is “some impossible marriage”, which is about right, though marriages don’t usually include a spell at Brighton.
The long way round to the City Ground
Clough and Taylor’s route from Derby to Nottingham went via two of the strangest jobs in English football. They went to Brighton, then in the Third Division, in November 1973, and by Glanville’s account failed completely: Clough tried to bully limited players into performing like stars and the results were “disastrous”. In July 1974 Clough went alone to Leeds, a side he had publicly called cheats, and lasted 44 days. In January 1975 he became manager of Forest, and in the summer of 1976 Taylor left Brighton to join him. “Only then,” Glanville writes, “did things begin to move.”
And they moved fast. Forest went up from the Second Division in 1977, won the league in 1978, and won the European Cup in 1979 and 1980, plus League Cups in 1978 and 1979. Glanville calls it “an astonishing achievement with a club that had won nothing of consequence since the FA Cup in 1959”, and it’s hard to improve on that, except to say that Derby fans had to watch the same two men do it again just up the A52. Part of the trick was a familiar one. Glanville credits the pair with “their old flair for signing players”, the same eye that had found McFarland and Gemmill for Derby, and among the players who made that Forest side was a left-winger called John Robertson, who will matter later. If you want a sense of how far Forest’s ambition went in those years, the signing of Trevor Francis, Britain’s first million-pound footballer, is a good place to start.
Meanwhile Derby had already won the league again without them, in 1974-75, their second title in four seasons, a season we’ve written about in part one and part two of our look back at that year. It’s a strange fact of this rivalry that Derby won the second of their two titles in the gap between Clough and Taylor’s resignation and their reunion at Forest. It’s as if the club had to prove it could do it alone before the pair went off and did it bigger somewhere else.
Robertson, and the end of a friendship
The final break came, as these things do, over a transfer. Taylor retired from football in May 1982, ending the partnership with Clough. Six months later, to everyone’s surprise, he became Derby’s manager. That’s the account given by his daughter, Wendy Dickinson, in a BBC Nottingham interview in 2009, and it’s also where you’ll find the key date. In May 1983, she says, Taylor signed John Robertson, Forest’s left-winger, behind Clough’s back. “It was the incident that ended their friendship and all contact was severed.”
Glanville’s obituary tells the same story but puts Taylor’s return to the Baseball Ground in 1984, which doesn’t fit with a signing in 1983. I’ve gone with the BBC dates, because they come from his family and fit together, and I mention the discrepancy because this is one rivalry where every detail is contested. What isn’t in doubt is how it ended. Taylor died in 1990, aged 62, on holiday in Majorca. Dickinson says Clough rang her at home after hearing the news and was “deeply upset”. “I think he always regretted not making it up with dad. If dad had lived I think possibly they would have.”
Her interview is worth reading in full, because it pushes back against the easy version of the partnership, the idea that Taylor found players and Clough shouted at them. “Dad was much more than a talent scout, Brian was much more than the motivator,” she says, and she quotes Martin O’Neill: “you could get a pasting from Peter and Brian would be the one to put his arm around you.” She also gives the best review The Damned United is ever likely to get from a member of the family. Timothy Spall, she says, was “a bit short, a bit rotund and played my dad with a Brummie accent”, and the film made her father “too nice” and Clough “a bit of an arrogant, over-emotional nutter”. It is hard to think of a sentence that would have pleased Clough less, or amused Taylor more.
Glanville’s obituary, meanwhile, has the stories that made Clough Clough. He once asked a young centre-forward, Nigel Jemson, whether he had ever been punched in the stomach, and when the answer was no, punched him: “Well, now you have.” After a League Cup win over QPR in 1989 he went on to the pitch and struck several fans who had run on, and he was fined £5,000 and banned from the touchline for the rest of the season. When Everton’s players wrecked their dressing room after losing a League Cup tie, he told the cleaners to leave it as it was, because Everton were due back three days later. Every story is charming in the telling and slightly alarming the moment you picture it.
The corner flag and the touchline
After Clough retired, for a while the rivalry ran mostly on memory. It came back to life in the late 2000s, when the clubs found a new cast of characters to fall out with. Billy Davies had managed Derby before he took over at Forest, and Nigel Clough, Brian’s son, who had played most of his career at Forest, was in charge at Derby. If you were writing the plot, you’d worry that it was a bit much.
In August 2009 Forest beat Derby 3-2 at the City Ground. The Guardian’s report opens with the line “Forest fans can drive the A52 with a smile again”, because it was their first win over Derby “in nine games and six-and-a-half years”. Radoslaw Majewski scored from 30 yards after 53 seconds, Forest were three up at half-time, and by the end they were hanging on after two own goals. Then, after the final whistle, Nathan Tyson picked up a corner flag and paraded it in front of the Derby fans, the bench staff squared up, and the players ran in to form a melee. Kris Commons, a former Forest player, had a miserable afternoon for Derby and didn’t come out for the second half. Davies said his side had “pummelled them”. Nigel Clough, with the air of a man who’d been there for all 90 minutes, said he couldn’t remember his keeper having a save to make.
The return match, in January 2010, was worse. Derby won 1-0 and, according to the Guardian, Davies accused Clough of running over during a mass confrontation and kneeing him in the back of the leg. Davies refused to shake hands and called the act “cowardly”. He also described himself as “just a wee Scot” and Clough as “a strapping lad” who “should pick on someone his own size”. Forest and Derby had already been fined £15,000 and £10,000 respectively for failing to control their players at the City Ground in August, and the FA now opened an inquiry. Davies, who had played in Old Firm games, said what struck him was the “pettiness” around the fixture: “I’ve never come across anything like it.” Coming from a man who knew Glasgow, it’s one of the stranger compliments this derby has been paid, and quite possibly the most accurate.
Rooney’s Derby and the long road back
For the next decade the clubs mostly passed each other on the A52 going in opposite directions. The low point for Derby came in the 2021-22 season. The club went into administration that autumn and, the BBC reported in April 2022, the season was “crippled by a 21-point deduction” for entering administration and breaching the EFL’s financial rules. Wayne Rooney’s side were relegated with three games to go after an 88th-minute defeat at QPR, and BBC Radio Derby’s Ed Dawes thought they’d done remarkably well to get to game 43. Without the deduction they’d have been 17th. Instead they went into League One for the first time since 1986, with five players under contract for the following season and a transfer embargo. The former owner, Mel Morris, had put the club into administration 208 days earlier, and a sale to the American businessman Chris Kirchner was still dragging on. Dawes was already warning listeners that “minus 15 points is a very strong possibility next season”, and consoling them that at least it would be “from the off and not in late September”. There’s a particular kind of Derby optimism in that sentence, the sort that gets you through a winter at the Baseball Ground and, later, Pride Park. Six weeks later Forest beat Huddersfield 1-0 in the Championship play-off final at Wembley, a Levi Colwill own goal ending what the BBC called their “23-year wait for Premier League football”, in a season that had begun with one point from seven games. You couldn’t make it up, and the people of Derby would have preferred it if somebody had.
That should be the end of the story, but the rivalry has a way of not ending. Derby climbed back to the Championship. Forest stayed up, and in the summer of 2026 appointed Oliver Glasner, who had won the Europa League with Eintracht Frankfurt and the Conference League with Crystal Palace, as head coach. By October it hadn’t gone to plan. On 11 October, the Guardian reported, Forest went a goal up at Selhurst Park in the third minute and lost 3-1, while the Palace fans sang “You’re getting sacked in the morning” at their old manager. A week later Arsenal won 1-0 at the City Ground, and the BBC worked out that it had been “eight hours and 26 minutes” since Forest last scored at home. The defeat left them in the relegation zone. “It feels very harsh, it feels unfair, but we have to accept it,” Glasner said.
Derby were in their own trouble. After a 4-1 defeat at QPR in mid-October, John Eustace told the club’s website that his side had a long injury list, a new back line and players still getting used to the Championship, and that “the Derby County family has got to stick together and not look for any excuses. Understand that we’re in a difficult spot, but that we’ll come through it.” So in the autumn of 2026, for the first time in a while, both clubs are looking at the bottom of their tables at the same time. A Forest relegation and a Derby recovery would put them back in the same division, which is the one outcome fans of both clubs would hate and secretly enjoy.
A rivalry about resemblance
I said at the start that this rivalry is about a family resemblance, and the sources keep proving it. The same two men built both great sides. The same players crossed between them: Robertson under Taylor, Commons in 2009 being booed by one set of fans for having played for the other. The same managers changed sides, from Davies to Nigel Clough, who grew up as a Forest player and became Derby’s manager. Even the statue of Clough in Nottingham’s Old Market Square, unveiled in November 2008, and the long argument about whether Taylor got the credit he deserved, are versions of the same quarrel. Dickinson put it simply: “The reason why Nottingham Forest are on the map is because of those years when they were together, Brian didn’t do it alone.” Derby fans would say the same about 1972.
Plenty of English rivalries are older, bigger or meaner. North London’s goes back to Henry Norris and a 1919 vote that Tottenham have never quite forgiven. But very few are built on a personal story as specific as this one. Derby and Forest don’t hate each other because they’re different. They resent each other because each club has a claim on the same two men, and each feels the other took more than its share. When a corner flag is waved in front of an away end, or a manager accuses another of a sneaky knee, or an old winger is signed for the wrong side behind his old manager’s back, you’re watching an argument that began in a Middlesbrough reserve team in the 1950s. Neither side has ever been willing to let it go, and on the evidence of every source I’ve read, neither man would have wanted them to.
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