'I was asked in an interview to sum up Brian in three words. I
think he would be insulted to be summed up in three
volumes.'
Martin O'Neill had a point. Brian Howard Clough was never less
than a complex man; the sum of a contradictory bunch of impulses,
desires and drives. Jonathan Wilson, in this first full, critical
biography draws an intimate and powerful portrait of one of
England's greatest football managers, and his right-hand man,
Peter Taylor, and reveals how their identities were forged in the
unforgiving world of post-war football, a world where, as Clough
and Taylor's mentor Harry Storer once said, 'Nobody ever
says thank you.'
Clough's playing career was famously and brutally cut short in
the sleet and mud at Roker Park on Boxing Day, 1962. It was at that
point that Peter Taylor remarked the iron first entered into his
pal's soul. But as the likes of Inter Milan became a familiar
sight in the mud of the Baseball Ground, and the residents of
Nottingham were soon accustomed to floodlit nights of European
glory by the misty banks of the Trent, Clough, incredibly, brought
the gleam of silverware to the depressed East Midlands of the
1970s.
Initial triumph at Derby was followed swiftly by the high drama of
sudden departure and a traumatic 44 days at Leeds. By the end of a
frazzled 1974, Clough, always mindful of his austere roots in a
Middlesbrough council estate, was set up for life financially, but
also hardened to the realities of football. By the time he was at
Forest, Clough's mask was almost permanently donned: a persona
based around an exaggerated brashness and seemingly unquenchable
thirst for conflict. The mask, though, doubled as a shield behind
which lurked a more insecure, less confident being, a man who while
craving company was frequently alone . . . Drink fuelled the
controversies and the colourful character; it heightened the
razor-sharp wit and was a salve for the highs of football that
never lasted quite long enough, and for the lows, wh
