A Review Of Provided You Don't Kiss Me

When I first heard about Provided You Don't Kiss Me, Duncan Hamilton's biography of legendary Nottingham Forrest manager Brian Clough, I learned that the story often reduced BBC presenter John Inverdale to tears . I also learned that the book’s selection from the short list of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year took the panel only two minutes.

In terms of the tears, well let me look at the pencil marks I made in the book to see how many times I cried during the reading of this fantastic book, this beautiful piece of football writing. Let me see. Oh. I cried / welled-up a total of seven times. The tears began on page 235 for me, continued on pages 236, 241, 242, 247 and 252, finishing on 253, the second last page of the book. Seven times. The initial tearing started with Clough vacating his office singing Sinatra after his resignation and ended with the writer pouring out his reflections to his girlfriend over three bottles of wine, after hearing of Clough’s unexpected death.

Along with crying, the other category I found worth cataloguing with pencil marks was that of beauty and aesthetics. Let me see, I counted 14 uses of the word beauty or beautiful either by Clough the manager or Hamilton the writer and 11 references to aesthetics, art and style.

It is at the beginning of the book, on page 18, that Hamilton establishes this book as essentially an examination of beauty:

“Style mattered, and Clough fell into the category of high-minded aesthetician. It wasn’t enough to win—he wanted to win playing beautiful football.”

Hamilton admits at the end of the book and after Clough's death that the great, eccentric manager was like a father to him and that he learned many things about life from him - including beauty.

As for the title of the book - it is a reference to what Hamilton said on his returned to covering Forrest after Clough had chastised him and told him to never come back.

Clough was notorious for kissing one and all: men, women and children. He loved people. But Hamilton teasingly said that he didn't want a kiss from him. I suppose all he really wanted was to keep covering the man and the team - perhaps without the emotion or sentiment that can get in the way of proper writing?

But perhaps he'll accept kisses now - from me - for I loved his book - a book that is almost as much about the writer as it is about the great manager, almost as much about writing as it is about managing.

You know, there's a lot of football being played these days and a lot of books being written about football.

And I say sure - let there be football and let there be football writing.

Provided it's beautiful.