Back at Burton, Nigel Clough still believes in miracles

For many people, a milestone birthday can prompt some serious soul-searching, but in the case of Nigel Clough, 50 next week, it is another upcoming event that is on his mind when we meet at the Pirelli Stadium. The Burton Albion manager is curious to know what will happen when The Independent, his newspaper of choice, goes all-digital later this month. As it happens, his favourite reading – “I really like the features on a Saturday,” he says – will be available online and so too the daily crossword he enjoys. Yet if he admits to the occasional struggle with the puzzle, Clough has certainly got most of the answers right since returning to this corner of Staffordshire in December.

Clough came back to the Pirelli Stadium – six years after his departure for Derby County – to replace the Queen’s Park Rangers-bound Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. He inherited a team with a two-point lead at the League One summit and has since moved them four points clear, notwithstanding Tuesday’s defeat at Bradford City.

It is all a far cry from the circumstances he found when he first arrived at the club in 1998. Then he was a 32-year-old player-manager and Burton a non-league club. His first match at Eton Park, the team’s former home, drew a crowd of 561 for an FA Trophy tie against Grantham. Yet with a maximum wage of “£150 a week” for his part-timers, he lifted the Brewers out of the Northern Premier League and charted the course for their 2009 promotion to the Football League, leaving for Derby in January that year with Burton 13 points clear at the Conference summit.

Today’s Burton are a different proposition as Clough, sitting in an executive box at the stadium, explains. “We have got a media department – we never had one of those in the Conference,” he smiles. Yet, significantly, he has found the fabric of the club unchanged. “I think that has been part of the success, it has stayed the same club. It feels the same – same chairman [Ben Robinson], same directors, same staff – and it is no small achievement to keep that feeling while going up the leagues. So many of them lose it and I think it is one of Bournemouth’s great traits as well. As they’ve come through the leagues I don’t think they’ve lost what their identity is all about.

“It is funny looking at the teams that we have gone past and teams we looked up to and tried to emulate, like Hednesford when they were in the Conference, and Chester and Boston – teams we’ve gone past through the sensible running of the club.”

Clough, wearing a black training top, looks younger than his 49 years. Indeed, it is hard to think the “nice young man” – an epithet celebrated in song by Irish indie band The Sultans of Ping FC – is about to enter his sixth decade. Clough’s father, Brian, was in his 10th year at Nottingham Forest when he reached 50. Last October, Clough Jr – or “our Nigel” as his dad called him – took the opportunity to relive his father’s triumphs with Forest at the premiere of the film about those golden days on the banks of the Trent, I Believe In Miracles. “It was sad and at the same time it brings back a lot of happy memories,” he says. “It was difficult watching it, but at the same time it was nice watching it with the players and their families.”

Reflecting on his own career, Clough offers a calm assessment of the spells at Derby and Sheffield United that preceded his return to Burton. “We are perfectly happy with the jobs that we did there because we look at the clubs when we went in and we look at the clubs that we left,” he says, the “we” referring to his managerial team of Gary Crosby, Andy Garner and Martin Taylor.

At Derby he brought through young players like Will Hughes, Jeff Hendrick and Mason Bennett – currently on loan at Burton – while reducing the budget. “Probably no matter what we do here, or anywhere else, keeping Derby up in that first season was as good as we will do.”

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At both clubs the sack eventually came, yet the warm ovation received at Bramall Lane last week prior to Burton’s 1-0 victory showed that his efforts in taking the Sheffield side to FA Cup and Capital One Cup semi-finals, as well as to last season’s League One play-offs, were appreciated. “To beat five Premier League teams – and four of them away from home as well – was some achievement.”

Now opportunity knocks back at Burton – and with it the novel experience of taking over a team at the right end of the table. “When I sat down with David Oldfield who was [Hasselbaink’s] assistant manager before we came in, I said to him, ‘We are going to literally not change anything’, but he said, ‘They can improve, you can improve them, without a doubt’.”

So it has proved. Burton, their full-backs given greater licence to attack, have improved their goals ratio and widened their lead. Clough refuses to “tempt fate” by contemplating Championship football for a club with an average attendance of 3,900, yet he, of all people, could be forgiven for believing in miracles.