This week, Ebury Press announced the forthcoming publication of yet another book about Clough, this time centring on his career at Derby County FC, where, in the early 1970s, he transformed a team of mediocrities into the champions of England.
Clough’s War will be written by Don Shaw, an award-winning television dramatist whose credits include classics such as Z-Cars, Danger UXB and Van der Valk, and a man who also found time to lead a spirited fans’ campaign to keep Clough at Derby.
Towards the end of last year, the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year was awarded to Duncan Hamilton’s Provided You Don’t Kiss Me, which detailed the author’s intense one-to-one sessions with Clough when the latter was manager of Nottingham Forest, a period that coincided with Hamilton’s rise from cub reporter to experienced sports journalist.
His memories of being kept waiting, stricken with terror, in the corridor outside Clough’s office ought to have earned him a prize for perseverance, at the very least.
But if Hamilton colonised the Forest years, Clough’s most sustained and successful managerial appointment, then David Peace made just as much out of his shortest and most ignominious - the infamous 44 days at Leeds United that nearly crushed him in 1974.
The Damned Utd, recently given the honour of its own South Bank Show and remarkable chiefly for its mesmerising mingling of fact and fiction, drew critical praise and enough hits in the annual books of the year lists to keep it in print indefinitely. It is also being filmed, with impersonator extraordinaire Michael Sheen turning from Tony Blair to Ol’ Big ‘Ead.
But not everyone took to The Damned Utd. Perhaps the most high-profile dissenter was the former Leeds player Johnny Giles, a man to whom one might think the word legend adheres by local by-law.

telegraph.co.uk