FRANK Johnson covered Sunderland for The Northern Echo for over 40 years and was at Roker Park the day Brian Clough's playing career came to an end.

I can still remember that wintry Boxing Day afternoon in 1962 when a simple challenge virtually ended the career of one of Sunderland's best-ever strikers.

Brian Clough and the Bury goalkeeper clashed in front of the Fulwell End goal, leaving the 28-goal centre-forward in a crumpled heap. It looked an innocuous challenge - prompting Bob Stokoe, the fiery Bury player-manager, in the heat of the moment, to vehemently accuse Clough of putting it on.

It was a charge Stokoe, himself to become a Sunderland legend, always regretted.

The injury could not have been worse - a torn cruciate ligament in the knee, something in those days even the best Harley Street surgeons could do nothing about.

It brought to an end one of the most flamboyant careers in the game. Clough was a phenomenon, a walking goal-machine who knew no fear on the pitch and who demonstrated an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time.

Physically he looked nothing special, but he had a predatory streak which made him the scourge of Second Division defences, first with Middlesbrough and then with the Sunderland club he joined for a reported £45,000 in July 1961.

Clough transferred to Roker Park with a great goalscoring reputation - he scored 204 goals in 222 matches for Boro - and lived up to it, quickly becoming a darling of the Roker faithful.

He grabbed 34 goals in 43 games, including five hat-tricks, and had 28 to his credit before his ill-fated appointment with Bury in front of a crowd of 42,407, who agonised more about Clough's injury than the 1-0 first home defeat of the season.

Clough did make a long-awaited comeback, in September, 1964, scoring one goal in three games. But it was not the Clough of old and he sadly informed the medical advisors that his knee was gone.

What a tragedy it was, for there can be little doubt that Clough - only 26 at the time of his injury - could have gone on to great things as a player and would certainly have added to his two international caps, despite an irascible tongue which was often scathing of those in authority, and something which probably cost him his dream of managing England.

But Clough was always unpredictable on and off the pitch, with a mischievous streak which often troubled his superiors.

Once, in a pre-season photo-session on the pitch at Roker Park, Clough found himself standing beside the club physiotherapist, Johnny Watters, white-coated with his faithful old pipe protruding from his breast pocket.

Without anyone noticing Clough pinched the pipe, and put it between his teeth just as the photographers clicked their shutters. And there he was next day on the back pages of the papers, resplendent with a briar sticking from the corner of his mouth - a prank which did not go down at all well with his disciplinarian manager, Alan Brown!

But that was Cloughie - a one-off who never did anything quite by the book. But he was a player no-one who remembers those early 60s in the North-East will ever forget.

He was certainly one of the Sunderland all-time greats.