Be Good, Love Brian: Growing up with Brian Clough

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It was a life transformed. Time spent on the team bus with England internationals Stuart Pearce and Des Walker, taking part in training sessions, witnessing Wembley cup final wins. Memories to cherish. "Growing up around heroes and having amazing experiences." This is a beautiful, inspirational story, which has never before been told, about Clough’s gentleness and capacity for generosity. Discover a very different side to this iconic man, one away from the cameras and the football, which shows him for the person he really was. The reason I wrote the book is 2 fold. One, up until the point I turned into a shit, it was a beautiful story and one I felt should be told to show exactly what an incredible person BC was and what a beautiful family the Clough'a are.

Brian was at the front of the Forest bus, slumped in his seat. The deaths had left him distraught; the early, confused reports that Liverpool fans have stormed the gates and triggered a catastrophe have left him furious. It is easy to see why Clough would feel empathy with the waifs who turned up that day in Seaburn but it does not explain everything that followed. Why did he do it? In simple terms, it seems that Clough, a North East native, just enjoyed their company.

They did not want to ruin my life. Brian did say that he had brought me down to give me a better life and if he had called the police my life would have been over. It is something I struggle with, letting them down as I did when they had shown me such love. This is a fantastic read, I found it to be very well written and a very personal and open account of Craig's Bromfield's incredible story. Gorgeously moving, hilariously funny and incredibly insightful. Craig Bromfield’s beautifully written book about his life with Brian Clough is one you’ll never forget as there are laughs, tears and life lessons. It also solved lots of Christmas present dilemmas as I bought ten copies.” – Julie McAffrey, Daily Mirror

The Clough family dealt with the situation with more class than I would have, I just think it would have been better for the author to replicate that response by leaving some things unsaid. Craig also witnessed Clough’s descent into alcoholism, accelerated by his experience of the Hillsborough tragedy (Forest were playing Liverpool the day dangerous overcrowding in two terrace “pens” led to 97 Liverpool fans being killed). “I saw someone I loved deeply start to decline. But if anything he became even more protective with me.” In 1993 Forest were relegated and Clough retired. He was only 58 but he looked like an old man, his eyes dulled and distant, his cheeks reddened and blotched by alcohol. It is a study in society. The haves and have nots. It's a story of love and what it means to have it or not have it as a child. It's a story of belonging, escape, believing in magic and miracles and fate and whether you can ever truly escape where you are created. Even now, he follows Nigel's teams with a passion, having switched his support from Burton Albion to Mansfield when he moved clubs. He goes to games home and away. "It is my weak way of showing I am loyal when I was not loyal as a kid," he explains.To do that I had to be honest about the life I had before I met them. If I then went on to hide what I did the whole book would be a lie. This isn't about what people think of me. It'a about what people think of them. Whatever consequences or criticism I face, I deserve.