Until injury intervened, Brian Clough (1935- 2004) was a talented and promising footballer, then the leading scorer in all four divisions. He went on to be a successful, iconoclastic manager, most notably for 19 years at Nottingham Forest. Hamilton's career as a sports journalist began just after Clough's at Forest. For two decades, as he recorded the vicissitudes that Forest and all clubs are heir to, his professional and personal life was much intertwined with Clough's.

This memoir is the result. It won the 2007 William Hill prize - the Booker of sports books - and also carried off the biography award at the British Sports Book Awards 2008. It did both deservedly. Hamilton has unusual gifts of empathy, and he brings us the real, visceral Clough, a driven, driving man. “And then he began to yell, and the sound came from the back of his throat, and it was a roar of bile, the way you might imagine the last trumpet blast of the apocalypse”.

The book has many insights: “a football team is always a work in progress”. Hamilton catches the quick of Clough's achievements at Forest. “No other club successfully brought back so many of the players it had sold...and always for a fee lower than the one Clough received for them”. Hamilton addresses Clough's vices, and his abundant virtues. This is a moving, salutary account of Clough's rise and, right to the very bottom of too many whisky bottles, his tragic, Faustian fall.

Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough by Duncan Hamilton
HarperPerennial, £8.99 Buy the book here

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