Customer Reviews
Genius - By: chris widgery, 09 Oct 2008 
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 & went & 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, & a fag, when apprentices had to clean the pros boots, & 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".
The best of the Clough books - By: R. Gardham, 11 Sep 2008 Just when you thought everything that could be written about Brian Clough had been written, along comes Duncan Hamilton & trumps the lot of them. There are very few, if any, people that stayed with Clough throughout his time at Forest, & 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, & 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 & endearingin 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 didin the inferior, over-rated Damned United - & 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, & it was fully deserving of its William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. Cloughie's character & legend are so strong that there will be dozens of books written about himin the years to come, but none will come close to this fine work.
A Big Story... - By: Robert Machin, 16 Jul 2008 
Excellent, straightforward sports biography, distinguished by Hamilton's closeness to his subject & the resulting intimacy of the portrait. No tricks, no fiction or imagined scenes, just sensitive writing & informed analysis of the Clough career & of a very different timein British football - a big enough storyin 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 & 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 & frailties, & by an increasingly dominant subtext - a (literally) sobering account of how low even a character as powerful as Clough could be laid by alcohol.
His favourite word was`s*ithouse`! - By: JUDE, 09 Jul 2008 This is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. I am old enough to remember Clough at his managerial peakin the seventies. What he managed to achieve at two relatively small clubs will never be repeated. Also, I had often wondered why he & his friend/assistant Peter Taylor fell out & Duncan Hamilton explains the whole sorry tale. Do yourself a favour & buy this book.
A Big Story - By: Mr. Robert Machin, 04 Jul 2008 Excellent, straightforward sports biography, distinguished by Hamilton's closeness to his subject & the resuting intimacy of the portrait. No tricks, no fiction or imagined scenes, just sensitive writing & informed analysis of the Clough career & of a very different timein British football - a big enough storyin 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 & 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 & frailties, & by an increasingly dominant subtext - a (literally) sobering account of how low even a character as powerful as Clough could be laid by alcohol.
