Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough

This book is fantastic. Not a biography, not exactly a memoir, but instead a series of reflections of twenty years spent with Ol Big Ead himself. Clough was a one off - brilliant, impossible, bonkers, infuriating, despicable, loveable, untameable. He took a nothing provincial club and went and won the European Cup. Twice. Unbelieveable.

And this book does the man justice. Crucially, it also does Peter Taylor justice; describing their symbiotic partnership. It also brings back a real nostalgia for the times when footballers weren't pampered prima donnas earning £150k a week. They liked a pint, and a fag, when apprentices had to clean the pros boots, and the game was simpler, less bloated. And when there was room for real characters. And this is a loving but seemingly honest portrait of the biggest character of them all. Demands to be read alongside "The Damned United".

Just when you thought everything that could be written about Brian Clough had been written, along comes Duncan Hamilton and trumps the lot of them. There are very few, if any, people that stayed with Clough throughout his time at Forest, and no one had the access to Cloughie that Hamilton enjoyed.

To say the book is about Clough, however, is a bit misleading. It's more about his relationship with Hamilton, and how he plays the father figure to the young Nottingham Evening Post journalist. One review criticises the book for going into Clough's more unsavoury characteristics - the drink, the bullying, the whole treatment of Peter Taylor - but I applaud Hamilton for this. In revealing Clough's flaws, you see the vulnerability of the man, making him more human and endearing in the process, rather than the quote machine that others writers have presented him as. Hamilton never pretends to know what Clough was thinking - as David Peace did in the inferior, over-rated Damned United - and indeed Clough's unpredictability is a central theme to the book. Hamilton simply presents the facts as he saw them.

There will never be another Brian Clough, more's the pity, but Duncan Hamilton has provided us with a fitting testament to the man's career. The book is as good as sports writing gets, and it was fully deserving of its William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. Cloughie's character and legend are so strong that there will be dozens of books written about him in the years to come, but none will come close to this fine work.

Excellent, straightforward sports biography, distinguished by Hamilton's closeness to his subject and the resulting intimacy of the portrait. No tricks, no fiction or imagined scenes, just sensitive writing and informed analysis of the Clough career and of a very different time in British football - a big enough story in its own right to require very little embroidery.

Duncan Hamilton makes no bones about how fortunate he was to be allowed unparalleled access to the force of nature that was Brian Clough. The portrait that emerges seems to come from something for which 'love' is maybe the only appropriate word; it's to Hamilton's credit that it never seems like obsession as, throughout, he is remarkably clear-eyed about Clough's weaknesses as well as his astonishing triumphs. The excellent and detailed accounts of how Clough took not one but two poor-to-middling English clubs to the heights of European glory (a feat that one struggles to imagine being repeated today) are balanced by an understanding of his very human insecurities and frailties, and by an increasingly dominant subtext - a (literally) sobering account of how low even a character as powerful as Clough could be laid by alcohol.

This is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. I am old enough to remember Clough at his managerial peak in the seventies. What he managed to achieve at two relatively small clubs will never be repeated. Also, I had often wondered why he and his friend/assistant Peter Taylor fell out and Duncan Hamilton explains the whole sorry tale. Do yourself a favour and buy this book.

Excellent, straightforward sports biography, distinguished by Hamilton's closeness to his subject and the resuting intimacy of the portrait. No tricks, no fiction or imagined scenes, just sensitive writing and informed analysis of the Clough career and of a very different time in British football - a big enough story in its own right to require very little embroidery.

Duncan Hamilton makes no bones about how fortunate he was to be allowed unparalleled access to the force of nature that was Brian Clough. The portrait that emerges seems to come from something for which 'love' is maybe the only appropriate word; its to Hamilton's credit that it never seems like obsession as, throughout, he is remarkably clear-eyed about Clough's weaknesses as well as his astonishing triumphs. The excellent and detailed accounts of how Clough took not one but two poor-to-middling English clubs to the heights of European glory (a feat that one struggles to imagine being repeated today) are balanced by an understanding of his very human insecurities and frailties, and by an increasingly dominant subtext - a (literally) sobering account of how low even a character as powerful as Clough could be laid by alcohol.