Nottingham Forest (first Spell)
Robertson had played for Scotland at Schoolboy and Youth levels and for Drumchapel Amateurs before joining Forest in May 1970, making his debut for the team in October 1970. Although he was an infrequent member of the first team as a midfielder up to 1975, and was on the transfer list when Clough became manager, Robertson became a key player as a left winger under Clough and appeared in 243 consecutive games between December 1976 and December 1980. He scored the winning goal, a penalty, for Forest in the 1978 Football League Cup Final replay against Liverpool. He also scored the winner in the European Cup Final against Hamburg in the 1980 final and provided the cross for the winning goal in Forest's 1979 European Cup Final scored by Trevor Francis against Malmo F.C.
Brian Clough, Robertson's manager at Nottingham Forest, was quoted as saying "John Robertson was a very unattractive young man. If one day, I felt a bit off colour, I would sit next to him. I was bloody Errol Flynn in comparison. But give him a ball and a yard of grass, and he was an artist, the Picasso of our game." In his autobiography Clough noted that "Rarely could there have been a more unlikely looking professional athlete... scruffy, unfit, uninterested waste of time...but something told me he was worth persevering with." but that " became one of the finest deliverers of a football I have ever seen - in Britain or anywhere else in the world - as fine as the Brazilians or the supremely gifted Italians."
Read more about this topic: John Robertson (footballer Born 1953)
Famous quotes containing the word forest:
“It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,—to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)