Football: Webb finds there is life after United: Why did he fall out with Alex Ferguson? How is Brian Clough? The England midfielder gives Joe Lovejoy some answers

FROM the theatre of dreams to Cloughie's worst nightmare. As career moves go, Neil Webb's transfer from Manchester United to Nottingham Forest was well up in the Pete Best class, but this is an artist prepared to suffer for his art, and happy to be back at his spiritual home.

Neil desperandum? Not quite. United are top of the Premier League, Forest rock-bottom, but the clubs are not too far apart in terms of their traditional approach to the game. Certainly there are worse places than the City Ground for a playmaker to ply his trade.

Webb accepts that the move was hardly a progressive one. He has gone back, in every sense, but feels he had no option after hitting a brick wall in the four-square shape of Alex Ferguson.

The relationship between the two became so bad that this most mild- mannered of players can hardly bring himself to mention the F word. Whenever Ferguson crops up in his conversation, the United manager takes the third person. 'He' dropped me, 'he' wouldn't let me play for England, 'he' didn't give me a fair crack of the whip.

Webb accuses Ferguson of many things - allowing a degenerative over-confidence to undermine United's challenge for the championship last season, disrupting the team's rhythm by making too many unnecessary changes and, most serious of all for the uncommitted, putting club before country, and refusing to release able-bodied players for international duty. After all that, Brian Clough and his eccentricities were small Smirnoff.

In fairness, Ferguson has only to point to the League table to justify his methods and he and Webb were never going to be bosom buddies. The fire and brimstone Scottish whip cracker from the life and death school had very little by way of common cause with the Corinthian southerner to whom it is all just a game.

Webb shares an agent with Gary Lineker, John Barnes and David Gower and, like his stablemates, he is not one to turn a drama into a crisis. The Forest crisis is pretty dramatic, of course, but nothing the acquisition of a goalscorer like Portsmouth's Guy Whittingham (Webb's personal preference) could not put right. He had recommended Whittingham to Ferguson when United's goals dried up last season, but by that stage a reference from Webb was akin to getting the black spot from Blind Pugh.

LOOKING back, Webb feels the rift was rooted in his unexpected omission from the team which won the Cup-Winners' Cup final in Rotterdam the previous year. 'Being dropped for that one was my biggest disappointment. I was stunned. I couldn't take it in.'

All was temporarily forgiven when Webb was restored to play a central part in the barn-storming start which saw United win 14 and lose just one of their first 20 League games last season. It all turned sour, as it so often does, when Wimbledon came to call, towards the end of March. For once, though, the dastardly Dons were not to blame. Webb's recall by England provoked a confrontation which was the beginning of the end.

He explained: 'We had a team meeting on the Friday before the Wimbledon game, and he (Ferguson) said: 'I'm not letting anyone go for the internationals next week because I want you all to rest up.' It wasn't just me. He was pulling all his internationals out, but I was the only one who said I'd like to go.

'England were playing in Czechoslovakia on the Wednesday, I'd only played once in three years and the European Championship was coming up. We were top of the League, and I didn't think it would be a problem, but he obviously thought otherwise, and I wasn't allowed to go. He pulled me out at the weekend, saying I was injured, but I trained normally on the Monday.'

Substituted yet again against Wimbledon (he was hauled off 12 times last season), Webb reacted with a histrionic 'show of pettiness' which was a carry-over from the England argument. 'I was dropped for the next game, Queen's Park Rangers away, and didn't play in the next four. He (Ferguson) said I should have pulled out gracefully, and not voiced my objections, but I had wanted to play for England. It's an honour, after all.'

When Webb was left out again in April, and failed even to make the bench for the 1-0 defeat by bottom-of-the-table West Ham, he knew he would have to leave. 'That was it,' he said. 'For me and also for the team. The coach journey home was the longest I've known. It dawned on everybody that night that we had blown the best chance the club had had of winning the title in 25 years. We should have won it. We played some great football in mid-season. The biggest problem was over-confidence. Things were going so well that we thought we'd won it in February, and there was still three months to go.'

Ferguson's meddlesome management had been a hindrance rather than a help when the tide turned against them, Webb felt. 'I think he changed the team too much. We were putting substitutes on and making four tactical switches on the pitch. It wasn't just one for one. Someone was going on and Clayton (Blackmore) was moving from left-back to right midfield, Lee Sharpe was going to full-back and Micky Phelan would swap over. It upset the rhythm, and I'm sure we lost a few games because of it.'

Webb missed the shattering denouement - 'Losing the title was desperately disappointing, but not being involved at the end was even more so' - and was convinced his future lay elsewhere when, after playing for England at the European Championship, he returned to start just two of United's eight pre-season friendlies. 'He (Ferguson) didn't give me a fair crack of the whip, and said if he got an offer he'd let me go. At one stage, he told me I had too high a profile for a reserve player, and accused me of manipulating the press, which was nonsense. I was 29. I couldn't afford to hang around where I wasn't wanted.

'In the three years I had at United, I experienced just about everything. I had a seven-month injury (ruptured Achilles), I was made captain, I had the captaincy taken off me, I was substituted countless times, left out of important games, lost the League and won the Cup.

'I knew they'd have a good chance of winning the title this year, and I really think they will, but I wasn't in the team, and I needed to play. It summed up my luck at United that I was sold when I was sitting in hospital, waiting to have a scan on a swollen knee.'

The knee problem was nothing more serious than routine wear and tear, but an inflamed Achilles has restricted Webb's mobility and training since Forest took him back, in November.

SURGERY will probably be needed during the summer, but rest (he is excused training for all but two days each week) and anti-inflammatory drugs are enabling him to play a key part in the all-hands-to-the-pumps relegation struggle.

Changes? He had returned to find the new chairman, but the biggest surprise had been the specialist fitness coaches whose weights and circuits have replaced the old five-a-sides twice a week.

'You don't see a ball on Mondays, which is totally weird to me. After an hour and a half running and weight training on my first day back I was dead. Forest have been accused of not being fit enough in the past, but they are fit now, all right.'

On the field, it was deja vu. Get stuck in to get out of trouble? Heresy. 'Wimbledon came out with that one when we played them, but we're not the sort of team to fly into tackles. Our football is basic, too, but in our case basic means getting it and passing it to the next man. Everything has to be played to feet, which suits me down to the ground.'

Reports of BC's infirmity were wide of the mark, Webb insisted. 'The gaffer hasn't changed at all. We still only see him a couple of times each week. He doesn't take the training, but he's never done that anyway. He has always left it to the coaches. He comes in on Fridays, just for a natter, but he never says anything about the game.' What does the doyen talk about? 'Life. What we've been doing with ourselves in the week, and all that.

'He's not one for team talks or dossiers on the opposition. His pre-match routine is to put a towel on the dressing-room floor, put a ball on it and say: 'That's your best friend; treat it nicely.' That's his ritual. As a player, you are told what to do when you first join the club, you have a week to learn what we do and how we play, and that's it. After that, he gives you licence to be an adult. He allows you responsibility on the pitch, where you can do what you like, within reason. He lets me try what he calls a wonder ball every so often. Mind you, if it doesn't come off, I get a shout to keep it simple.'

Ferguson, the hands-on workaholic, and Clough, a master of economy in word and deed, were as different in style as their teams are in status.

'With Alex,' Webb said, 'we'd have a half-hour team talk before every game - who is going to pick up who, who goes where at set-pieces and so on. Before matches he gets very tense, and during games he's very expressive. You can see that he's very up.

'Brian Clough is very expressive in the dug-out. He's not quiet by any means, but before games he's very relaxed, and he likes the players to be relaxed, too. If I'm not smiling he has a go at me. He may look dead-pan on television, but that's because he can see the camera coming. When I chipped that goal against Southampton he gave me the thumbs up. That's a particular favourite of his.'

Will it be thumbs up or down for Forest, come the end of the season? 'We need to start scoring goals, and winning our home games. We've got 10 left, and we need to win eight of them.'

Relaxing, as per managerial command, is difficult in such circumstances, but if anyone can do it the insouciant Webb can.

'Do you know what Forest stands for? Fighting Off Relegation Every Saturday Teatime.'

Steady on, Neil. Old Big 'Ead might find that one a bit too relaxed.

(Photograph omitted)