From the article in the Guardian - their first match at Goodison - fascinating:
Forest were the nouveaux arrivés and in their first match, away at Everton, it was quiet on the bus going into Goodison Park. A letter had appeared in the Evening Post that day predicting “that Forest will come straight down, while Notts County clinch promotion”. The sign-off, “Faithful Magpie”, gave a clue as to the author’s loyalties, but the players on that bus were anticipating a long, hard slog. John Robertson was sitting beside O’Neill. “I was nervous as hell,” he remembers. “I think we all were.”
Taylor sensed it too and came into his own before kick-off with a 10-minute routine of jokes and anecdotes that worked wonders to change the mood. All the same, it was an intimidating place to start, with the Everton fans welcoming them on to the pitch with chants of “Lambs to the slaughter”. Woodcock remembers the noise when Everton ran out being “so loud you felt you almost had to duck down”. Forest played the first 20 minutes, according to O’Neill, “in our own penalty box”. Everton had reached the League Cup final the previous season as well as the FA Cup semi-finals. They were another team with title aspirations and the pressure on Forest’s goal was almost unremitting during the early exchanges. “I honestly thought this was really too much,” O’Neill says. “We couldn’t get a breather.” But the new defence held out. Burns had moved in seamlessly alongside Lloyd and, 20 minutes in, Forest broke out to win a corner. Robertson swung it over. The ball thudded off Withe’s forehead. Forest’s No9 had scored at the ground where he had once stood outside selling programmes – and the team had lift-off.
Dave Jones, Everton’s right-back, described what followed as the best performance from an away side he could remember at Goodison. Their captain, Mick Lyons, had written in the programme he had a strange feeling Forest might be “the surprise team of the season”, but the performance was a sensation. Duncan McKenzie, who had joined Everton the previous season, said he was amazed at how slick and efficient his old team were. Robertson doubled the lead with a shot into the top corner before Jim Pearson pulled one back just before half-time. O’Neill added Forest’s third in the second half and there could have been more.
Lloyd puffed out his chest and sucked in the air of the top division, where he had always thought he belonged. Burns passed his first real test with distinction. John McGovern thought he had done pretty well too, only to find out afterwards that Clough disagreed. “He started giving me the rollicking of my life in the dressing room,” McGovern recalls. “I’d gone forward too much for his liking and I’d had the temerity to think I might score and tried a couple of shots from just outside the penalty area. He was telling me I should have given it to somebody else – ‘Give it to a good player because a good player has a chance of scoring and you don’t’ – when someone started knocking on the door.
“That dressing room was usually sacrosanct. Clough wouldn’t even let in the chairman, but when he swung open the door his face changed. ‘Come in,’ he said, ‘delighted to see you.’ We couldn’t see who it was at first, but he said it like it must be the pope or the prime minister. ‘Bill, I’m just giving them a rollicking, telling them how poor they were, but I think you should do it.’ And it was Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool manager. Clough sat down with the rest of us and suddenly it was Shankly, this legend of the game, giving the team-talk for the next 15 minutes, with his hands in his pockets, in the classic gunslinger pose.”
That quarter of an hour gave the Forest players an insight into why Kevin Keegan once said of Shankly that “he made you feel any mountain could be climbed”. Keep your feet on the ground, was the crux of it, because there was still a hell of a way to go. But he also said there was no way Forest should undersell themselves if they could play that well and Clough was manager. “You can win it,” Shankly told them. “Don’t just be in the First Division, go and win it. Keep playing like that and you can win the championship.”
