Why we need this new book about Brian Clough
Do we really need another book about Old Bighead?
Actually, yes.
Brian Clough A Biography - Nobody Ever Says Thank You is the definitive book because it’s the longest and because the author tells a complicated story beautifully and is balanced in all his judgements.
As you'd expect from a historian on football tactics, Jonathan Wilson is very good on the patterns of play that this otherwise unpredictable manager always required.
Wilson has done a monumental amount of original research and he quotes cleverly from local newspapers, rival managers and earlier biographies to create a compelling portrait of the most gifted, charismatic and controversial character that English football has ever thrown up.
As a footballer, Clough was a fearless centre forward who scored 197 goals for Middlesbrough in 213 league games, then joined Sunderland. He'd scored 24 in 24 appearances in 1962-63 when, in bitterly cold and wet conditions on Boxing Day, he went for a 50-50 ball with Bury keeper Chris Harker and suffered a horrific knee injury. His cruciate and medial ligaments were completely torn. He tried to come back after two years of rehab but the injury finished him.
Clough was 30 and the youngest manager in the Football League when he took over penniless Hartlepool with his perceptive sidekick Peter Taylor. He achieved miracles at Derby before stupidly offering his resignation, was, predictably, a fish out of water at Brighton, mismanaged Leeds in kamikaze fashion for 44 strife-torn days, and then, in 1975, became a dictator at Nottingham Forest for 18 years, winning promotion, the First Division title and two European Cups by 1980.
One of the most cunning motivators the game has ever seen, Brian Clough was also one of its craftiest and most indefatigable self-publicists.
He exploited the media and made loads of money out of TV and Sun exclusives with his pal John Sadler. Good judges always insist that the Midlands messiah owed his success to exceptional man management and brilliant buying and selling.
His bold statements generated excitement, grabbed headlines, and increased crowds, even in sleepy old Nottingham, which was never a hotbed of football like Derby, who were near the bottom of the old Second Division when Clough and Taylor took over in 1967.
Asked on arrival what he hoped to achieve over the next five years, Clough said, "We want to win everything. The sky's the limit."
He signed Dave Mackay, a Spurs half back who was astounded because, as the Scot said, he was older than the manager. They won promotion in 1969. With Roy McFarland, Colin Todd, and Archie Gemmill, three of the finest players of the decade, Derby won the title in 1972, and then reached a European Cup semi-final against Juventus, where they were cheated by a corrupt referee in April 1973. The Derby team he left was so good that Mackay, the next manager, won the title again in 1975.
This comprehensive 550-page biography gradually reveals a magnificent but flawed leader of men: hypnotic, funny and daring, but also insecure, lonely, devious and paranoid. While it lacks the warmth and first-hand anecdotal detail provided in books by journalists who worked with Clough for decades, the book makes up in objectivity what it lacks in immediacy.
By explaining carefully where Clough came from, what life was like in a family of eight kids in a poor part of Middlesbrough, and showing how tough the football world was in the Fifties and Sixties, he lets us understand why Clough behaved as he did. Maybe that was why Wilson didn't discuss bungs sooner in the story.
Brian Clough became an alcoholic wreck long before he got Forest relegated in 1993, the first year of the Sky-financed Premier League, and he needed a liver transplant in 2003. He died in 2004 at the age of 69.
The book is a £20 hardback that you can get for £9 from Amazon.
Dec 9, 2011