Countdown to 22-23: Sydney FC striker Adam Le Fondre used big match for England to persuade Zach Clough to join Adelaide United, hears Tom Smithies.
July 11 2021 was the day hopes of European Championship glory died for England fans – but a new dream began to take shape for two of them.
Adam Le Fondre and Zach Clough watched the final of Euro 2020 together in England with their families, the two of them old team-mates and old friends – close enough that Le Fondre was pitching the idea of a move to Australia for Clough. Unlike England that day Sydney FC’s marksman hit the target, as usual, and within six months Clough had signed for Adelaide United.
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So far the fanfare for the 27-year-old attacker has been muted, certainly outside Adelaide, but a delve into their shared past gives a clear signal of the skilful and smart player United have secured. Clough’s recent career also tells you why it has taken him a little while to find his feet in the A-League Men, as an absolute case study in the way the tectonic plates of top-flight football can shift beneath your feet and stymie the brightest young talent.
“I loved Cloughy, I loved him as a player,” Le Fondre said last year. “Me and Cloughy clicked. I loved playing with him he’s such a good and clever footballer.”
Others shared that opinion going back to an eight-year-old Clough signing for Bolton Wanderers’ academy, and including former Celtic boss Neil Lennon who was Wanderers manager gave Clough his debut aged 19 and was rewarded with the winning goal from someone he described as “a special player”.
Clough was quickly in demand elsewhere, linked with a host of clubs on the basis of his performances for Bolton in League One. Eventually Nottingham Forest paid Bolton some $5.5m and gave him a contract of almost five years.
In retrospect it was a bizarre purchase, like the others Forest wqere making at the time; the club only had an interim head coach in place, Gary Brazil, and within six months Forest had been sold. Impatient for promotion to the Premier League, the new owners bankrolled a dizzying procession of new signings, with regular changes of coach. For 22-year-old Clough, the future was suddenly a mess.
“I signed for an owner who left the club six months later, and the new owners obviously wanted to be in the Premier League straightaway,” he recalls for KEEPUP. “The money that was thrown around was ridiculous, and for a young player like me, we were signing 10-12 players every single transfer window.
“It was just really, really difficult to get your head around, where do you stand here? You lose confidence, you lose focus, because you don’t feel a part of that situation. You feel like the new owners don’t want you there. So it was just a tough time really. And to have such a long contract, it was hard to walk away from a good contract that you signed.
“When I signed I didn’t have a clue who the new manager was going to be. It was hard to be at a club like that at the time, with all the turmoil. There were loads of boys in my situation. Some of them were lucky and got out pretty quick and some lads were obviously stuck there. So many players went through it.
“It’s so hard to get out of the Championship and now that Forest have made it to the EPL, what they’ve done is what they did every single window before – but because they’re in the Premier League, everyone’s seen it on the biggest scale.
“They sign so many players and have such a big turnaround, obviously the owner’s got massive ambitions to take them to the very top.”
Reading Forest fansites, there’s also a sense that Clough was somehow burdened by his surname – Zach is absolutely no relation to Brian Clough and his son Nigel, both of whom have venerated places in the history of the club.
But stil fans admit that they somehow expected something extra just because he was a Clough – instead, Zach and other players were suddenly training with the youth team. His fitness, confidence and rhythm deteriorated, and a couple of loan spells and then short-term deals weren’t enough to reboot that.
“That’s one thing I’ve learned in the last three or four years, that when you have two years of hardly playing, it’s probably taking the same amount of time to get back to where I was,” he says. “I didn’t think it would take me as long to get back. But at a professional level, when you’re training with kids for 18 months, it’s difficult to come back to men’s football.
“That probably was my biggest hindrance in England, just little injuries and stuff that I would pick up because you play so many games. I think one season I played 43 games and that was probably my best season because my body felt really good. When I get to that point, the football just takes care of itself.
“I feel like I’ve done all right (at Adelaide so far), coming off 18 months of not playing. It’s all about rhythm for me.”
Le Fondre’s advice looks increasingly vindicated and it helps that Clough feels settled in Adelaide, living in a beachside apartment and enjoying the United set-up under Carl Veart.
“He’s been a breath of fresh air for me, because you never know what he’s thinking,” Clough admits. “But you always want to try to impress him.
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“Because he’s your manager, you always want to impress him, but he gives you very little back. Or sometimes he’ll give you a pat on the shoulder and stuff and that’s when you know, you’ve done you’ve done something really good.
“Even tactically, I’ve really enjoyed it in the way that we try and play as a team. It’s exciting. It’s an exciting way to play.”
