“A hooligan from Birmingham City called Kenny Burns, to use Lloyd’s description. They also bought Peter Shilton and Archie Gemmil “Three world-class players; that was the point I started thinking maybe this guy Clough wanted to do something in this division.”

Kenny Burns arrived at Forest and, to put Lloyd’s words into context, even the club that was selling him told Clough he must be mad thinking he could tame the Glaswegian. Burns was notorious.

He had committed one tackle in an Aston Villa–Birmingham derby that 30 years later made it into a feature in the Times about the 50 most X-rated challenges of all time.

He spent his nights at the dog track and he was not even on speaking terms with some of his team-mates at St Andrew’s. “Don’t buy him,” Birmingham’s chairman, David Wiseman, warned Clough. “He’s trouble.”

Clough’s information was that Burns drove around in a battered Vauxhall Viva with no MOT or insurance (“Not true,” Burns always insisted).

A picture developed of an untamed, hard-drinking pub-brawler.

Clough didn’t want someone bringing bad headlines to the club and was so opposed to the idea it caused friction between him and Taylor. “Forget it,”

Clough said when Taylor came up with the idea. “I don’t want troublemakers, I don’t want sh*t-houses and I don’t want an ugly bastard like Kenny Burns littering my club.”

But Taylor wouldn’t let it go.

He had heard Burns was a stone overweight and losing money hand over fist to the bookmakers, but he still thought it was worth investigating and went incognito to the Perry Barr dog track to find out whether the gossip was true. “He didn’t recognise me in my disguise of flat cap and dark glasses,”

Taylor later reported. “Nor did he realise that the punter so often at his shoulder as he placed a bet was Forest’s chief scout Maurice Edwards.”

Taylor’s report back to Clough was that it was moderate stuff – “tens and twenties, nothing higher” – and nothing they couldn’t handle. Birmingham accepted a £150,000 offer and Clough told Burns to have a shave, buy himself a decent coat and meet him the next day at a garden centre in Long Eaton, on the road from Nottingham to Derby.

Kenny Burns’ signing was initially opposed by Brian Clough but Peter Taylor pressed ahead and the Birmingham striker was turned into a successful centre-half. Photograph: Colorsport/REX Shutterstock

When Burns turned up, he discovered they were naming some flowers after Clough at an exhibition of sweet peas. “I didn’t have a clue,”

Burns says. “I thought we were going to look at some peas – as in, garden peas. I mean, peas are peas, aren’t they? Green things. What kind of peas are sweet peas? I know what green peas are. I know mushy peas. In Scotland, flowers are just things whose heads you kick off when you’ve had a few pints on a Saturday night.”

The horticultural lesson over, there was another surprise waiting for the man Clough insisted on calling “Kenneth”. Burns had scored 20 goals in 38 games the previous season as a centre-forward.

Yet Clough, going by Taylor’s recommendation, had something different planned. “Perhaps it sounded insane to switch a goal-taker into defence, but there was good reason for our madness,”

Taylor would later explain. “I suspected Burns didn’t relish life up front because the running didn’t suit his lazy nature. What’s more, we desperately needed a sweeper alongside Larry Lloyd and I visualised Kenny turning into a Scottish Bobby Moore. He was as skilful as Moore and certainly more ruthless.”

Nobody, however, had bothered to tell the man himself. “Peter Withe and Tony Woodcock thought I was being signed to take their place,” Burns says. “It was the trainer Jimmy Gordon who let me know.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘bibs on – Middleton, Anderson, Barrett, Lloyd, Burns, McGovern, O’Neill, Bowyer, Withe, Woodcock, Robertson.’ And that was it. That was the first I knew about the new partnership with big Larry.”

He would play for Scotland twice at centre back in the 1978 World Cup Finals. The previous year he had played for Scotland as a striker!

Kenny Burns and Trevor Francis. Hampden. May 1978.

You can still smell Billy Bremner’s fear…