'Provided You Don't Kiss Me - 20 years with Brian Clough' by Duncan Hamilton, Fourth Estate.

Sean O'Conor

Three years after his death, the cult of Brian Clough is alive and kicking.

In an age where the beautiful game in England seems less and less so, Cloughie is the first figure you hark back to for nostalgic comfort, a reassurance that football was once just that. In 1992, two eras overlapped. The 'year zero' of the Premiership was also the swansong for that most remarkable of English football managers and his life has now entered the realms of semi-legend.

Like all heroes, he performed amazing feats, inspired awe amongst those around him and was utterly fearless in the face of his enemies. His deeds were plain to see but you never really knew what made him tick as an aura surrounded that most amazing of English football managers.

Was he really the incredible coach who made mediocre players into outstanding ones at the drop of a flat cap? Did his players really prepare for major games by sunning themselves and getting drunk? Was one man really able to control an entire football club from top to bottom, including the fans?

Throughout the reign of King Brian at Nottingham Forest, Duncan Hamilton was close by, at first a sheepish teenage reporter for the Nottingham Evening Post and before long a trusted confidant who joined the players on the team bus and enjoyed access to the almighty on a daily basis. Sooner or later that chunk of his life demanded a retelling and Provided You Don't Kiss Me - 20 years with Brian Clough is the result.

Hamilton's privileged position handed him a priceless key to the private Clough no other chronicler has had, including the big man himself, whose two autobiographies are overly headstrong if not at times dishonest.

Where Clough himself failed to look honestly in the mirror, Hamilton fills in. This is a riveting tale of how greatness rises and falls, a story of how nagging insecurities and internal weaknesses eventually conquered a publicly swaggering genius. Touching and eloquently written, Provided You Don't Kiss Me is Clough in close-up - a painfully honest, word-for-word as-it-happened history of an amazing man at his best and worst.

Anyone who remembers Clough should read this book, and one can only hope the younger generation of fans will seek out the tale of one of the true characters of the game that existed before Sky TV.

Every chapter is laden with untold incidents - vignettes of Clough's coaching genius, his myriad eccentricities, moments of human pathos, drink-fuelled rages, bitter rants and quarrels, or acts of family love and random kindness.

There is Clough using his pet Labrador to select his team, buying food for strangers, haranguing his players on a darkened coach after a defeat and the poignant final moments of his tenure at the City Ground, as he puts 'My Way' on before pouring himself a vodka and sitting silently while the clock ticks unerringly towards midnight.

Despite this being the fifth book published on the subject, Provided You Don't Kiss Me fills in a number of gaps in Clough's story and illuminates some hidden corners.

It was interesting to learn there was more than met the eye about Clough's public pleas to coach first Scotland and then Wales, and Hamilton also explains the jarring episode of his black market ticket dealings in the early 1990s and the oddity of a prolific club goalscorer winning only two caps for his country .

The football marriage of Clough and Peter Taylor is also witnessed from close quarters, which renders their eventual falling out and Clough's subsequent regret ever more tragic. The ruler of a fiefdom where thousands of fans, players and directors once obeyed his commands and quivered in his presence, slipped slowly but surely into a twilight of booze and failure on the field as his powers waned.

Hamilton began his journalism when Clough was in his fourth decade, and he confesses he can only theorize as best he can why the man was such a one-off, based on what he saw of him.

Nevertheless, while accepting the enigma of Clough will endure, Hamilton has probably come closer than anyone ever will to distilling a remarkable football coach and unforgettable man.

Sean O'Conor

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