At the time of Clough’s appointment in January 1975, ‘old big ‘ed’ rather modestly stated: ‘now there is one thing in Forest's favour - the club has me’. Clough’s confidence, or even arrogance, wasn’t misplaced and the turnaround was well documented in the BT Sport documentary ‘I Believe in Miracles’ (complete with an excellent 70s soul soundtrack). The turnaround though was not quite so immediate.

Though eliminating Terry Neill’s Spurs side in the third round of the FA Cup with a 1-0 win at White Hart Lane in his first game, Forest crashed out of the Cup to that year’s runners up Fulham in the following round. There followed nine matches without a victory until a 1-0 home win over Sheffield Wednesday at the start of April, one of just three league victories for Clough during 1974/75 – a run which included a 0-3 loss to Norwich at Carrow Road in their penultimate fixture as Forest sunk to sixteenth in the second tier. As Clough would explain: ‘Forest could have been relegated the season I took charge, for one basic reason. We were crap’.

After scaling back his media appearances, 1975/76 saw an improvement for Clough’s Forest who finished eighth in the second tier, though the major transformation came after Clough was joined by his former right hand man at Derby and Brighton - Peter Taylor - in 1976, after the latter stayed on at Brighton when Clough left the South Coast to head to Leeds United. Oddly enough, the foundation for further success came with winning the ‘mickey mouse’ tournament of the Anglo-Scottish Cup in December 1976 with a 4-0 win over Orient at the City Ground in the second leg of the Final to give Forest a 5-1 win on aggregate.

As Cloughie explained in his autobiography, published in 1994: ‘Footballers need something tangible to prove that they are on the right lines. The competition known as the Anglo-Scottish Cup was frowned upon as a meaningless, valueless trinket. Not by us. We had players who had been nowhere, won nothing. We wanted something to show for our belief that we had the makings of a useful side, capable of winning promotion back to the First Division’. On route to promotion that season, Forest managed a 1-1 draw with fellow promotion challengers Chelsea. Brian Clough’s side completed their fixtures with a 1-0 home win over Millwall on May 7th, which put them in third place and in pole position for promotion.

Bolton Wanderers in fourth place however could still catch them with three games in hand. One week later though, a 1-0 win for Wolves over Bolton secured the Second Division title for the former, meaning that the latter required a win by a thirteen goal margin to overhaul Forest. Promotion was secured while Forest were air bound on a team holiday to Majorca, as Bolton could only manage a 2-2 draw away at Bristol Rovers. Forest’s first season back in the top flight started with three straight victories, with a 3-1 away win over Everton, a 1-0 home win over Bristol City and a 3-0 home win over Derby County before a visit to Highbury at the start of September 1977.

Arsenal however raced into a two goal lead with two goals from Frank Stapleton. Forest’s resident Hell’s Angel look-a-like Kenny Burns was clearly struggling to contain Frank all afternoon and after getting away with a head butt on Arsenal’s Richie Powling while standing in the wall for a free kick, an off the ball foul on Stapleton lead to a penalty for Arsenal which Liam Brady duly converted to give the Gunners a 3-0 win. Kenny Burns however at least thought he’d escaped censure with the head butt, though as described in an interview with the Daily Mail in October 2015: ‘I used to go to a local drinking establishment with my neighbour and we would have a few pints and then get back for Sunday dinner. So I was sitting eating my food on my lap when The Big Match came on. When I saw what I had been caught doing, I threw my plate up into the air and I shouted, 'Oh for God's sake! Jesus Christ!’

Burns admits that: ‘I knew I was wrong. But I also looked upon it as a chance to send out a message. If I was watching it on television, so were my future opponents. So it was like advertising — and it would frighten some of them off’. Brian Clough though was not one for such ill-discipline within his ranks. When Peter Taylor suggested signing Burns from Birmingham, Clough responded: ‘Forget it. I don’t want trouble-makers, I don’t want s**t-houses and I don’t want an ugly b****** like Kenny Burns littering up my club. I don’t buy thugs’, though Clough did eventually take Taylor’s advice. In the days before the FA took retrospective disciplinary action based on TV evidence – he fined Burns £50, which at the time was more than a third of his £140-a-week wages, as well as publicly condemning him for his actions.

Burns allegedly tried to explain to Clough it was actually a sneeze not a head butt, Clough though was clearly buying none of it. Clough’s disciplinarian tendencies however worked with Burns, as stated by Clough in his autobiography: ‘it was a case of demonstrating decent behaviour to a lad who had come from a rough background and who had few standards, if any at all. It was just like bringing up a child’. Clough however stated that Burns: ‘graduated with honours – not least the Footballer of the Year Award, after only one season with us’. Forest’s response to that defeat at Highbury was a run of nine games in which they picked up sixteen points out of a possible eighteen, which also coincided with the signing of Peter Shilton from Stoke City for what at the time was a world record figure for a goalkeeper.

The following week, they took a three goal lead over Wolves at Molineux with Peter Withe, Ian Bowyer and future Arsenal star Tony Woodcock on target. Wolves pulled two back in the final seventeen minutes, but Forest held out for a 3-2 win. There then followed a 2-1 win over Man City at the City Ground. The run was disrupted by a 0-1 defeat to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in early November and a further 0-1 defeat to Leeds United at Elland Road two weeks later. From thereafter however, Nottingham Forest would embark upon a record breaking unbeaten run.

After a 2-1 win over Coventry City in December, their first real statement of intent toward bigger things came a week before Christmas 1977 with a thumping 4-0 away win over Man Utd at Old Trafford with a goal for John Robertson, two for Tony Woodcock and an own goal by Brian Greenhoff. Arsenal visited the City Ground in late January to play a Forest side who had topped the table since early October, while the Gunners were five points behind in fourth place. Goals for David Needham and a goal of the season from Archie Gemmill gave Forest a 2-0 win. Two weeks later at the City Ground, Forest ran out 2-0 winners over Wolves with goals for Tony Woodcock and John McGovern.

Forest were also competing on more than one front and in early February were drawn against Leeds United in the Semi Finals of the League Cup. Brian Clough’s men came back from Elland Road with a 3-1 lead. In the second leg, goals for Peter Withe, Ian Bowyer, Martin O’Neil and Tony Woodcock gave Forest a 4-2 win on the night (7-3 on aggregate), which set up a meeting with reigning English and European Champions Liverpool in the final at Wembley after defeating Arsenal in the Semi-Final. One week ahead of the final however, their hopes of the treble were dashed with a 0-2 defeat to Ron Atkinson’s West Bromwich Albion in the FA Cup Quarter Finals at the Hawthorns.

Nottingham Forest bounced back to land the League Cup. After a 0-0 draw in the first game at Wembley, Forest landed the cup with a 1-0 win over Liverpool in the replay at Old Trafford with a hotly disputed penalty converted by John Robertson. Slow motion replays proved the offending challenge took place outside of the box, leading to the amicable Liverpool defender Tommy Smith to proclaim that the referee ‘deserved to be shot’. Nottingham Forest’s Cup Final song had been ‘We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands’, which had been a collaboration with Paper Lace of ‘Billy Don’t be a Hero’ fame, which reached number twenty four in the UK Singles Chart.

As Forest were a side playing out their first season back in the top flight after a six year absence, many parallels can be drawn between their title run in 1978 and that of Leicester City’s transformation from relegation candidates to title winners thirty eight years later. One particular parallel was that many observers wrongly felt that the bubble would eventually burst and one such high profile opinion to that effect was that of former Arsenal goalkeeper turned Football Focus presenter Bob Wilson. Wilson’s comments were as much a spur to Clough’s side as Alan Hansen’s ‘you’ll never win anything with kids’ quote was to Alex Ferguson and Man Utd nearly two decades later, with Clough saying of Wilson: ‘he’s putting himself up there to be shot at – and I’m doing the shooting’.

With five games left to play however, Forest found themselves just one point away from sealing the title. A 0-0 draw away at fellow Midlanders Coventry City, sealed by a superb performance from Peter Shilton, secured Nottingham Forest’s first ever League title. Their superb form carried through into the following season with a 5-0 hammering of Ipswich Town in the Charity Shield. Forest were homing in a record unbeaten run of then thirty games set by Burnley in 1920/21. The first four games of the season for Forest brought four draws before the visit to Arsenal to the City Ground in early September.

Brian Clough’s men equalled the record by inflicting a 1-2 defeat on the Gunners with a goal for Ian Bowyer and John Robertson penalty, while Liam Brady would be on target for Arsenal. The record would be surpassed the following week after a 1-1 draw with Man Utd at Old Trafford. In the meantime, Forest would be drawn against reigning European Champions Liverpool in the European Cup. In the first leg at the City Ground, Forest ran out a 2-0 winners with goals for Colin Barrett and Garry Birtles. Two weeks later, Forest held Liverpool to a 0-0 draw at Anfield to progress to the next round.

In the second round, Forest met Greek side AEK Athens and took a 2-1 lead back to the City Ground. In the second leg, Brian Clough’s men hammered the Greek side 5-1. In the meantime, Forest’s unbeaten record in the League stretched to forty two games unbeaten before heading to Anfield in December, where the run was ended by a 0-2 defeat. The record of course stood until surpassed by Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal in 2004. Forest’s next visit to Highbury came in mid-January 1979, for what was Brian Talbot’s debut for Arsenal.

Brian Clough’s men took a first half lead with a goal from John Robertson, however goals from David Price and Frank Stapleton gave the Gunners a 2-1 win and inflicting what was only the second league defeat for Forest in thirteen months. Arsenal would visit the City Ground again around six weeks later in the fifth round of the FA Cup, though in the interim would sign Trevor Francis from Birmingham in what was the first ever £1 million transfer. The original tie was postponed due to the heavy snow which fell during the early months of 1979 and finally played on a Monday evening.

Forest had been unbeaten at home all season, as well as for the whole of the previous campaign. Arsenal however were developing a reputation as the country’s premier cup side and walked away from the City Ground with a shock 1-0 win secured with a Frank Stapleton header. Forest themselves however were not too bad a Cup side either and around three weeks later retained the League Cup after a 3-2 win over Southampton at Wembley. Brian Clough’s men were also in the running for the European Cup, after brushing past Grasshoppers of Zurich 5-2 on aggregate in the Quarter Finals had set them up for a Semi Final tie with German champions 1FC Koln.

The Germans raced into a two goal lead, until goals from Garry Birtles and Ian Bowyer pulled Forest level before a header from John Robertson put Forest 3-2 ahead. However a late strike from Japanese substitute Okudera drew 1FC Koln level with the match ending in a 3-3 draw, which left Brian Clough’s men with a mountain to climb in the away leg. Two weeks later back in Cologne however, a goal from Ian Bowyer gave Forest a 1-0 win to put them through to meet Swedish Champions Malmo in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. In the League meanwhile, despite remaining unbeaten at the City Ground throughout the whole of the campaign, Forest’s title was wrestled back by Liverpool who won the league by an eight point margin over Forest in second place.

Brian Clough’s men however had the opportunity to seize Liverpool’s European crown and become the third English side to win the trophy in successive seasons. A first half goal from the £1 Million man Trevor Francis completed the journey for Brian Clough’s side to the summit of European Football with a 1-0 win over the Swedes. Forest returned victorious to a Civic reception in Nottingham. In 1979/80 however, Forest slipped to fifth in the League. Arsenal visited the City Ground in early December 1980 and left with a 1-1 draw, with Frank Stapleton on target for the Gunners.