To the dream-makers, I hope you knew how much you mattered

The first time I met Larry Lloyd, he showed me into his living room, offered me a cup of tea and proceeded to load it up with three monster spoonfuls of sugar.

I didn’t ask for three sugars but, let’s be absolutely clear, when Larry Lloyd makes you a cup of tea and decides you want three sugars, you gulp down the lot and say thank you very much.

He was football royalty where I grew up: a barn door of a centre-half in a wild and eccentric Nottingham Forest side that won two European Cups on the back of Brian Clough’s precious ability to mould a successful team from a collection of rogues, misfits, bargain buys and supremely gifted footballers.

In Lloyd’s case, he was a big man with a big personality, full of opinion, full of himself and afraid of absolutely nothing or nobody. He was a brilliant raconteur — naturally funny, never boring, a bit gobby — and the only member of that Forest squad who would regard it as a compliment that Clough liked to call him Bighead.

On nights out, Lloyd had a running joke with his team-mates where he would peer into his shirt pocket and pretend Kenny Dalglish was hiding in there from the night at Anfield, September 1978, when Forest knocked Liverpool out of Europe.

Lloyd had been marking Dalglish that night and barely gave him a kick. “Come on, Kenny,” he’d say, holding open his pocket, “you can come out now.” He would offer Pocket Kenny a sip of his pint and wish him better luck next time. Sometimes, he would slip a couple of crisps into his pocket, in the manner of someone feeding a starving hostage.

You didn’t mess with Big Larry. He went on to run the Stage Door pub in Nottingham and used to tell a story about Roy Keane, in his early days at Forest, being daft enough to start dancing on the chairs. Keane denies it was him. But Lloyd’s account was that he got hold of him, chucked him out and sent a message via Stuart Pearce, the club captain, that the young Irishman shouldn’t come back.

Lloyd had the same no-nonsense approach as a pundit on Century Radio. Or at least he did until David Platt, one of Forest’s less popular managers of the last 30 years, grew weary of the criticisms and made it clear to the station’s bosses that something had to change.

Lloyd ended up losing his job. I’d gone to see him for a book I was writing about Forest’s glory years. But he was still very sore and, behind that brash exterior, I did detect a bit of vulnerability, too. He had decided to move to Spain and, Larry being Larry, he wanted me to make it clear who he held responsible.

“I’d love to bump into the little slimebag,” he told me. “I owe Platt. I used to love that job, with the phone-in and commentating on matches. But Platt was fed up with hearing me slaughter him. I hate the man, hate him. He’s a d***head, and that’s on the record.”

I thought about those moments when the news came through in March that Lloyd had passed away. I remembered his achievements, of course, and the back-to-back European Cups, but also his status with a younger generation of fans who had never seen him play in the flesh.

Trevor Francis, who died last July, aged 69, was the first member of that team to leave us. Larry, who was 75, was the second. And it can be a strange, unsettling feeling when you are reminded that life is not quite as you imagined in your younger years. Your heroes aren’t superhuman, after all.

That doesn’t make Forest different from any other club. If you are a football fan and you have been following the sport for a certain length of time, it comes to everyone eventually. It doesn’t matter who your team is.

It has been a bad run, though, for us Forest fans after the passing of Kevin Campbell this weekend and, before that, the clump of emotions when we found out Chris Bart-Williams had left us on the very same day, just a few hours apart, that the news of Francis was confirmed.

Trevor — or Sir Trev, as we knew him — will always be remembered by a certain generation as football’s original Superboy. He was the first £1million footballer in history and, boy, he repaid every penny when he headed in Forest’s winning goal against Swedish champions Malmo in the 1979 European Cup final.

But then the years pass and, out of the blue, it’s an unremarkable Monday morning and there are ex-team-mates on the phone because they have heard some stuff they don’t want to believe is true. Someone has mentioned a heart attack and, though you are desperately hoping it’s all a mix-up or some Twitter hoax, you can hear in their voices they think it is real.

An editor comes on the phone. “We should run a tribute,” he says. “Do you want to put something together?” And I know this is the right thing to do because, in this job, there is always going to come a time when it is your turn to get that call. It is just hard, really bloody hard, when it is your club, your player, and all I have to do is swivel in my chair and I can see Trevor’s goal, in a frame, on my office wall. That picture, I imagine, appears on countless other walls up and down the country.

And now, we have lost Super Kevin Campbell, at the age of 54, and I keep thinking back to those happy photographs when he and Bart-Williams arrived together, in the summer of 1995, and you could tell, almost immediately, that they had hit it off.

Did they plan to wear the same colour suits? How sweet and charmingly old-fashioned that they thought they should mark the occasion by turning up on a hot summer’s day in a collar and tie. They posed for the cameras, standing back to back, holding up various Forest garments, and they never stopped smiling. They looked delighted to be there.

Lots of thoughts come to mind remembering Kevin Campbell. His goals, his smile, his popularity. All the tributes from Arsenal, Everton, Forest etc will say the same.

It was an exciting day for #NFFC when he and Chris Bart-Williams signed. So sad to see this picture now. RIP ❤️ pic.twitter.com/yUZkKShe8Z

— Daniel Taylor (@DTathletic) June 15, 2024

Campbell spent three years at the City Ground and he took a bit of time before demonstrating his incredibly useful knack of knowing how to find the bottom corner of the opposition net.

Nobody should have been too surprised, though, when he started banging them in. Not if you were old enough to remember Forest’s FA Youth Cup semi-final against Arsenal in 1988 when all the pre-match hype, in those pre-internet days, was of a player who went by the nickname of Rambo because he was so much bigger and stronger than your average kid that age.

The 18-year-old Campbell scored twice for Arsenal in a 3-0 win, then followed it up with a hat-trick against Doncaster Rovers in the final, showing the eye for goal that a few years later made him and Pierre van Hooijdonk such an exciting and prolific strike partnership in Forest’s colours.

Campbell’s final season in Nottingham featured 23 goals, promotion to the Premier League and so many personal highlights that only the most muddled and downright baffling football club would possibly decide to sell him to Trabzonspor for £2.5million that summer. Forest, sadly, were that club.

Campbell jetted off to Turkey and Van Hooijdonk was so aggrieved he went on strike and refused to return for the new season. Forest’s return to the Premier League was torpedoed before a ball had even been kicked in anger. Within a year, they had dropped back into football’s second tier. They remained out of the top division for almost a quarter of a century.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the fans who experienced those years of drift prefer to reminisce about the kaleidoscope of happy memories these guys left us.

Bart-Williams, aka the Bartman: big smile, mesmerising feet, goal dances before goal dances were really a thing. He was a dude. Somehow, it seemed fitting that he ended up living in Miami, wearing brightly coloured shirts and sunglasses.

Today should have been his 50th birthday.

Even now, it doesn’t seem real that he isn’t around to celebrate it — or that one of the more poignant tributes came from the man who was beside him, in their mustard suits, on his first day in Nottingham.

“RIP Chris,” Campbell wrote on Twitter. “Love you, Bartman! My lil brother we shared such great moments and I truly am devastated at the extremely sad news.”

If we are talking about special footballers, we should also mention Stan Bowles, the former England and Queens Park Rangers player. Bowles, was another ex-Forest man, albeit only briefly, and played in the triumphant 1979 European Super Cup second leg against Barcelona.

He died in February, aged 75, and these are moments when my mind goes back to various conversations with Forest executives when we used to talk about how lucky we were that all the “Miracle Men”, as they became known, were still with us.

It was one of the reasons, a few years back, the club were supposed to be putting up commemorative Miracle Gates at the entrance to the City Ground — to do it while all the relevant players were around to see it.

It never happened, sadly. But the memories live on and, in football, there is always the comfort blanket of nostalgia.

These guys were the dream-makers. If you were walking to the ground to see them, your step would quicken. They carried our hopes, our expectations, our affections.

There is something profoundly sad about losing the people you used to watch and hold on a pedestal. And when they are gone you hope, above all, that they knew how much they meant in other people’s lives.

(Top photos: Lloyd and Campbell in Forest colours; Getty Images)