LEGEND WAS A CLOSED BOOK!

CHRIS DUNLAVY DISCOVERS WHAT MADE THE ALTRINCHAM STALWART TICK

- CHRIS DUNLAVY

VIV Anderson, the former Nottingham Forest midfielder, once said Brian Clough’s greatest asset was his ability to inspire uncertainty.

“You never knew from one minute to the next what he was going to say, what he was going to do, what mood he’d be in,” said the 63-year-old.

“Sometimes he’d walk past you in the corridor and completely blank you. You’d think ‘Was I bad in training? Have I dressed the wrong way?’ He always kept you guessing.

“It meant that every time you did something, you did it to your maximum because you never knew what was going on his head.”

Graham Heathcote, who served Altrincham for four decades as a player, secretary, coach, and manager, is cut from similar cloth.

“Put Graham in front of an audience, he was hilarious,” says Stuart Coburn, who rejoined Alty in 2003 and played in goal for the entirety of Heathcote’s eight-year reign as manager.

“He’d do after-dinner speaking and bring the house down. But if we got beat or played badly, he’d sit at the front of the bus, put his head down and sulk. Everyone would be like ‘Don’t laugh, don’t say anything’.

“I always remember playing Luton away in our first game of the season. Twenty minutes before kick-off, he was walking round the changing room doing this shopping trolley dance, pretending to take food off the shelves. Everyone was laughing and joking.

“Then at 3pm it was ‘Right, stop messing about, we’ve got a game here’. We got beat 2-1 and he came in at the end going ‘You lot don’t f***ing care, you don’t take it seriously’.