Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

centre, up past the curved Newton and Arkwright Building of Nottingham University – named for two Midlanders who helped shape the modern world, I note in passing – and plunge into the manicured calm of the Arboretum, the first public park to be opened in the city, back in 1852, when industrialisation had begun to impact on the environment and the authorities judged it politic to provide locals with a little green breathing space. Today leaves carpet the ground in a rich tapestry of autumnal colours, while the foliage overhead offers a rich mix – a symphony, no less – of russets and greens. I can see that lots of different types of tree are involved in creating this eye-catching effect – it’s obviously all been planned with loving care by the landscapers – but I’m a city boy and so am completely incapable of telling you what they are, for which I apologise. What I can tell you is that, in the heart of this green oasis, there’s a little bridge that lovers usually find romantic and under which they pause to kiss. Personally, as a schoolboy I always found it rather sinister and fully expected to be knifed to death whenever I had to pass through it after dusk. My fantasies of murder aside, this is a nice place. ‘Thank you for visiting the Arboretum,’ says a notice as you exit, extending various options to those who might like to leave feedback on their park experience. Yes, it’s a very polite place these days, is Nottingham.

      Not bland, though. Nottingham stands on the river Trent, which is often taken as the line separating North from South. Certainly, it’s often served as a national dividing line: this is where Charles I raised his standard on 22 August 1642 to signal the beginning of the Civil War. The award-winning Galleries of Justice Museum characterise Nottingham as a ‘rebel city’, and it’s a title the city well deserves. The spirit of Arthur Seaton – that emblematic Nottingham Man, pace Stuart Maconie – runs deep in the city’s history.

      Nottingham sport has had its fair share of nonconformist Seatons. The county’s cricketing history is full of rebels, eccentric individualists for whom conformity was never an option. ‘Clown prince’ Derek Randall is a classic example. When Dennis Lillee tossed a bouncer down at the Nottinghamshire and England batsman’s head in an Ashes Test in 1977, Randall whipped off his cap and reputedly called out: ‘No good hitting me there, mate. There’s nothing to damage.’ When he was finally out – for 174; Randall may have been a bit of a joker but he was no clown with the bat – he exited the playing area by the wrong gate and found himself climbing the steps towards the royal enclosure. ‘[The Queen] was very nice about it,’ Randall reported. ‘She smiled. Someone else quickly put me right.’ The spirit of Sir John Cockle lives on, it would appear.

      Randall is part of a fine tradition of local cricketing unorthodoxy. In May 1930 the whole of the Nottinghamshire side famously took to the field in lounge suits on the final day of their match against Hampshire in Southampton. The previous day’s play had ended with the home side requiring just a single run for victory. The Notts captain, Arthur Carr, didn’t think it was worth the trouble of putting on whites the following morning: opening bowler Bill Voce actually wore an overcoat. His second ball yielded the necessary run.

      A couple of years later Voce was back in the headlines, albeit in a less whimsical context. It was the Nottinghamshire pacemen Voce and ‘bloody frighteningly fast’ Harold Larwood who led the England attack on the infamous Bodyline tour of Australia in 1932–33, when the visitors caused uproar by their use of so-called ‘fast-leg theory’. The latter – which involved bowling at the batsman’s leg stump and getting the ball to rise into his ribs – had been devised by the respective captains of Notts and England, Arthur Carr and Douglas Jardine, to neutralise the threat posed by the great Australian player Don Bradman, who at the time boasted a surreal batting average of around 100. The strategy worked so well that it nearly caused a riot in the Third Test at Adelaide, when deliveries by Larwood hit Australian captain Bill Woodfull above the heart and fractured Bert Oldfield’s skull – police had to intervene to stop angry Australian spectators from attacking the England team. We tend to think of Aussies as tough, but Nottingham Man is an altogether steelier proposition. When the Australian cricketing board accused the tourists of using ‘unsportsmanlike’ tactics, the English team threatened to withdraw from the remaining matches.

      In the event the series went ahead, and England claimed the Ashes by a 4–1 margin. The row reignited the following summer, though, when the governing body of English cricket, the Board of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which had dismissed the Aussies as ‘squealers’ the previous winter, had a chance to witness ‘fast-leg theory’ in action at home, this time against the West Indies. Suddenly the powers-that-be decided that Bodyline was indeed a mite unsporting, and so demanded that Larwood make a personal apology to the Australians. If he refused, the MCC said, he would forfeit his England place. The furious Nottingham man, feeling that he was being scapegoated, pointed out that the tactic had actually been the idea of his Oxford-educated captain – the plot having notoriously been hatched in the sumptuous surroundings of the Piccadilly Club in London. Why should he, a working-class pro who had previously been employed down t’pit, shoulder the blame for the supremely well-connected ‘gentleman amateur’ Jardine?

      Larwood refused to back down and as a result never played for England again. Ironically, having been vilified in his own country, he decided to emigrate to Australia. A sad fate, but Midlanders are natural outsiders: like Larwood, they generally accept their lot graciously. The great working-class fast bowler’s refusal to accept the blame for his officer-class captain’s tactics has since come to be seen as a key event in breaking down class distinctions in English cricket. All that stuff about working-class rebellion being a distinctively Northern phenomenon just isn’t true, you know.

      Sport is one of the major reasons why the Midlands lacks much in the way of national profile: the perennial footballing giants Manchester United and Liverpool are two of the biggest reasons why everyone knows where the North is. By contrast, no one outside Nottinghamshire takes the sport played here very seriously. Trent Bridge, the home of the County Cricket team, regularly hosts Tests, but its international matches rarely generate the excitement of the equivalent games played at Lord’s (the home of Southern cricket) or Headingley (the home of cricket in the North).

      Just around the corner from Trent Bridge is Meadow Lane, which hosts the oldest – and one of the least celebrated – of all professional football teams in the country, Notts County. They’re not very good at the game, of course, but that’s not the point – they’ve been not very good at it for longer than anyone else, and that’s what really matters. County scored major back-page headlines a few years ago when former England coach Sven-Göran Eriksson was appointed as their new director of football as a result of the club securing fresh financial backing from a Middle Eastern consortium called Munto Finance. Amidst feverish talk of an ambitious ‘project’ to get the Division 2 stragglers into the Premiership, the super-Swede was treated to a typically eccentric welcome on his arrival at Meadow Lane. ‘I had a wheelbarrow, the wheel fell off,’ a hundred or so supporters serenaded Svennis, much to the bafflement of national sports writers and presumably the Magpies’ new director of football himself. Shortly afterwards Munto pulled out and Eriksson resigned after the club was sold for a pound to former Lincoln chairman Ray Trew. Though obscure in utterance, the County fans’ prophecy proved correct: the wheel did well and truly fall off the barrow.

      Which brings us to County’s local rivals, Nottingham Forest, and another great Midland eccentric: Brian Clough. Strictly speaking, Ol’ Big ’Ead, as Clough was affectionately known, was raised in the North-East but as local sports writer Al Needham has put it: ‘Cloughie … was pure Nottingham. Chelpy as you like, stubborn as anything, gobby enough to have a go at Muhammad Ali on Parkinson, and he chinned Roy Keane. He was Nottingham’s surrogate Dad, and we were his lairy, sometimes bemused but always fiercely loyal kids.’ That loyalty was displayed after Clough’s death in 2004, when thousands of fans turned out in the Market Square to mourn his passing.

      It’s interesting that Clough, one of the most successful football managers of all time, should only ever have triumphed at unfashionable Midland clubs: before their world-beating reign at Forest, he and his long-term managerial partner, Peter Taylor, led the no less unheralded Derby County to the league title in 1972. But when Clough then took over an already successful, bona-fide Northern club, Leeds United, he was an abject failure, and his gobby, stubborn, chelpy