The Best Footbal Novel Ever ?

[Winrew]

You might pass that on to the little Winrew.

Check out the " two stone " thread in the GC section , i can hardly be called little ....

Anyway Pete , your acting like a knob and the fact that you keep posting your sanctimonious bollocks on here proves it , you seem content with picking small faults with all the members and reveling in a argument , are things that bad on the home front ????

[mrmuzeman]

You might pass that on to the little Winrew.

http://www.thedailypunt.com/forum/ge...two-stone.html

[mrmuzeman]

[mrmuzeman]

Btw I havent read enough to be able to say whats the best but I thought Roy Keanes was a good read. All the parts about the Irish management and slagging them off are pretty sweet.

[Wittmann 44]

I think that the book is supposed to be “faction” which is a fictional novel but with a very sizable element of facts sprinkled through it. I read an interview with Peace at the time who said that almost all the incidents in the book took place and are documented in the reading list at the back. Much of the “action” however takes place in Clough’s head as he thinks about the past and what is happening around him and bar a few lifts from a biography and some supposition on Peace’s part this is obviously his interpretation and not Cloughs.

If you take the incidents in the book as factual, Clough definitely comes across as a hugely temperamental egomaniac. His policy at Leeds was divide and conquer and confrontation which didn’t work against a team as closely bound together as Leeds. His early alcoholism is also plain to see as is the terrible way he treated people whom he felt betrayed him.

How much you can draw from Clough’s interior thoughts which show him haunted by the possibility of failure, bitter at the premature end of his playing career and his treatment by England management and of not being able to provide for his family is another matter altogether. Personally I find Peace’s take on Clough’s thought process convincing and again the man doesn’t necessarily come of it too well as a human being but as I said above it is fiction and it would be dangerous to think that the “real” Clough necessarily thought like this.

Whether you view it as fact, fiction or a mix of both it is still a brilliant read.

[Peter Orchard]

Curious about Clough, I did some reading a few years back and found this:

Justin Fashanu

which was instrumental in forming an opinion which has held good to this day.

There´s not much else around on the net so we have to rely on our personal remembrances but the guy came across then as a bully and a boor and what Peace writes in his book dovetails quite seamlessly into my own view of the guy.

His appointment at Leeds and his fixation with Don Revie´s record I don´t recognise but it´s a fact that Clough went to Leeds and for the first time he took up an appointment without Peter Taylor. That fact alone should be recognised when writing the man´s biography..

If it´s any consolation to the Clough groupies, I think the man´s record at Derby and Nottingham was brilliant but Clough is a man who had chips on both shoulders which would eventually reduce him to a minor personality in a small area of the UK with a few quotes in the footballers guide to the gob.