The original special one

In Britain sports writing is often seen as the toy department of journalism, which must make writing about football a sub-division reserved for the noisiest toys of all, the ones played with by rough boys prone to having tantrums.

As is often the way with clichés there is more than a grain of truth in this view. Books about cricket tend towards the poetically pastoral, golf prompts chin stroking ruminations on the meaning of life; books about football or ghost written for people who play football anyway, tend to be about bling and banality.

This is surprising and more than a little sad, having nothing of interest to say about our national sport is a little like having nothing interesting to say about ourselves. Thankfully every so often a book comes along like the one under review here that demonstrates the possibility of writing intelligently about football.

For twenty years Duncan Hamilton wrote about football for the Nottingham Evening Post, his tenure coinciding with that of Brian Clough as manager of Nottingham Forest. This isn’t a biography of Clough, instead Hamilton has written a series of snapshots of his career and character framed by an account of their often stormy friendship.

Hamilton shows Clough to be a mass of contradictions, capable of mercurial brilliance as a manager and shockingly bad behaviour as a man. A strict disciplinarian and a lifelong rebel; an avuncular father figure to his players and a snarling bully to the enemies he made with reckless abandon.

The relationship between Clough and his long time assistant Peter Taylor is worthy of a book in its own right. Hamilton recounts how Taylor spotted and nurtured Clough’s talents provided a thoughtful counterpoint to his often abrasive management style during their glory days at Derby County and then Nottingham Forest. It was the souring of their relationship in the early eighties that heralded the slow decline of Forest and Clough.

The most poignant section of the book is Hamilton’s unflinching description of how booze soaked; erratic Clough stumbled towards the evening of his career, his previously sure judgement shot to ribbons and his legacy ruined by rumours of shady financial dealings. If you’re looking for Brian Clough the archetypal blunt Northern male firing off one-liners like a machine gun this isn’t the book for you, he emerges from its pages as a suitable case for treatment rather than a comforting stereotype.

Duncan Hamilton has ruled himself out of the running as a potential biographer of Brian Clough and with good reason since he would be, perhaps, too close to his subject; but what he has written demonstrates that he is worth the attentions of one. Someone able to mine the deep seam of insecurity underneath the public persona he so carefully created, place his rise to prominence in the context of post-war British culture and, most of all, to attempt to explain how for one brief moment this gifted, difficult man became, by his own assessment, if not the best football manager in the country then certainly in the top one.

Provided You Don’t Kiss me
Twenty Years with Brian Clough
Duncan Hamilton
(Fourth Estate, 2009)