{ the forum }
 
An independent supporters' website dedicated to Mansfield Town FC

Broomo’s story

Discuss all things Stags and Football League Two, and share stuff using our BBCodes.
Forum rules
Please read the Posting Rules before participating. Posting on the forums is subject to adhering to these.
Also, see the Guidelines for Posting. Moderators may sometimes tidy posts which do not follow these customs.

Broomo’s story

Postby Dan » Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:11 am

I know a lot of people showed an interest into how Broomo started following the Stags after Nigel became our manager. Well here’s an article that came out a couple of years ago that will answer a few questions. I hope Broomo doesn’t mind me posting this. It’s such a heartwarming story. Grab a cuppa and give it a read.

The remarkable tale of two boys who went begging for pennies and ended up living with Brian Clough
Daniel TaylorOct 14, 2019
It began with two boys from a council estate in Sunderland — a “couple of scruffies”, to use their own description — trying to raise a few quid from what kids of a certain generation will know as “Guying”. Bonfire Night was approaching. School was finished for the day and the boys were positioned strategically with their Guy Fawkes doll outside the best hotel in town.
The date was October 19, 1984. They had made their Guy from a pillowcase stuffed with newspaper, a school jumper and a pair of battered old corduroys. The face was drawn on with their mum’s lipstick. Their mantra was “Penny for the Guy?” and, to begin with, 11-year-old Craig Bromfield and his 13-year-old brother, Aaron, didn’t realise they might have hit the jackpot when a group of men came into view wearing red tracksuit tops, with Adidas stripes on the sleeves and “some kind of flower” on the chest.
The flower was actually the tree of the Nottingham Forest crest. Brian Clough’s team were staying at the Seaburn Hotel, preparing for a game against Newcastle United, and it turned out professional footballers could be a lot more generous with their money than the locals. And certainly a lot less frightening than the stranger — head shaven, bovver boots, eyes filled with hate — who had terrorised them earlier that evening, aiming a kick at their Guy, for no other reason than Aaron was mixed race.
Kenny Swain, the Forest left-back, was the first to take an interest and did not seem to mind when one of the boys asked if they were a basketball team. Swain, a European Cup winner with Aston Villa two years earlier, explained who they were. He apologised for not having any spare change and he asked them to wait while he went into the hotel to see what he could find.
When he came back out, he had a sheet of paper filled with autographs. “He told us he was sorry he hadn’t been able to get everyone but some of the players had gone to bed,” Craig, speaking to The Athletic 35 years later, recalls. “He promised that if we went back in the morning he would get the rest. And he gave us a £5 note. If I’m honest, I spent more time looking at that than the autographs. It was the first time anyone had ever given me a fiver.”
At 7.30am the next day, the boys were back. Clough was on his morning walk along the seafront and, if you were to try to make sense of the following chain of events, it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say it is the kind of story that should probably be turned into a film. And for Craig, in particular, it was the beginning of a relationship that has shaped his entire life.
A relationship — crazy as it sounds — that led to him being taken in by the Clough family, living under their roof as one of their own. Brian, Barbara, their sons, Nigel and Simon, and daughter, Elizabeth. And Craig: a sixth, unofficial member of the family, saved from a difficult, often traumatic childhood at a time in his life when he badly needed some direction and guidance.
The strangest thing, perhaps, is that a library’s worth of books has been written about Clough — and none tell this story.
Clough wrote two autobiographies and spent virtually his entire career as the most quotable man in the business. Yet you won’t find a single word from him talking about what you are going to read here. Some things, plainly, mattered more to him than publicity or self-promotion. Which tells you a lot about the man when, at the heart of it, lies some extraordinary kindness. Not just from Clough, but his entire family.
It is some story, though, and it certainly isn’t easy for Craig, all these years on, to explain how he could go from asking for spare pennies on a street corner, living in an area where the poverty could make you weep, to moving in with the most famous manager in football.
Though maybe it helped, going back to their first encounter outside the Seaburn, that he made sure to refer to “Mr Clough” when he inquired whether Swain was awake, too. Craig was a year out of primary school, small for his age, with buck teeth, fluffy hair and failing eyesight. Aaron had big, brown eyes and a sunrise of a smile. And if there was one thing Clough always appreciated it was good manners.
“Have you two rag-tags had any breakfast yet? And where’s your coats? You’ll catch your bloody death. What’s your mam doing sending you out like that? Now come inside. Hurry up, before I change my mind.”
For two boys from Southwick, walking through the Seaburn’s revolving doors was like setting foot in a different world.
Southwick, on the north banks of the River Wear, was a hard-faced place to grow up in the 1980s. A “craphole”, to use Craig’s description. Though positively upmarket compared to their old place in Barclay Court and the now-demolished slums where his first memories were of “our Joanne (his sister) crying, cockroaches and darkness, but not much else.”
Their dad, a Jamaican-Geordie called Gerald, was a professional sign-writer. But he had a reputation. He was a hard man who used to shine his muscles with olive oil for added effect. He was also a thief, a low-level drug dealer and a magnet for trouble in a deprived area, selling bags of cannabis. He had a temper and when he came home drunk or in a bad mood, even sometimes if he had lost a game of pool at the Transport Club, he regularly used to hand out beatings.
“Never us,” Craig says, “but several shades out of our mam and for the smallest of reasons like bones in his fish, or his egg-and-tomato sandwiches being soggy, or if she hadn’t been able to sell enough brass off the walls to our neighbours so he could have a decent night out.”
He was their dad — strictly speaking, Craig’s stepdad — and they loved him. Even when they had to spend time in children’s homes, or a refuge against domestic violence, they still loved him. But it wasn’t a particularly happy childhood growing up in a cramped terraced house — two adults, four kids, two Alsatians — with not enough money for toilet paper sometimes, one set of clothes to last an entire week and virtually no belongings.
More than once, the electricity was cut off because they hadn’t paid their bills. The water, too. Jim McInally, Forest’s right-back at the time, remembers Craig (on the left in the photo above) and Aaron (right) as “two filthy kids … grubby little scallywags who looked like they hadn’t been near water in years.”
Perhaps Clough saw that, too. Maybe they reminded him of boys from his own childhood in Middlesbrough. Or, as he told the pair later, perhaps it was because he thought they relaxed the players, with their north-east accents and boyish innocence.
Whatever it was, Clough invited them in for breakfast and, once they had finished eating, he wanted to know if they liked football. “It was Kenny Swain who told us,” Craig says. “He said ‘the Gaffer’ had said it was OK if we wanted to go to the game. They would take us on the team bus and get us tickets. I didn’t know who ‘the Gaffer’ was — all I could think was the TV series with the big fat guy (Bill Maynard, who starred in an early 1980s sitcom with that title) — but there was no way we were going to say no.”
If the adventure was to end there, it would still have been a great story. Not many boys that age could boast they had dined with Brian Clough or that he had let them travel on the team bus. The game finished 1-1 and the boys watched from the stands at St James’ Park, risking hypothermia in their T-shirts, frozen to the bone.
The next morning, Craig sent a postcard to Clough to say thank you and, within a few days, a letter came back with a Nottingham postmark. Clough told them to work hard at school, look after their mum and come to watch Forest again some time. It was typed by Clough’s secretary, Carol, but signed by the manager with his favourite payoff: “Be Good.”
Whether Clough imagined his new acquaintances would be waiting for him outside Roker Park, when Forest took on Sunderland in the League Cup a few weeks later, was another matter. But his paternal instincts quickly kicked in when he saw the boys. “I was bullied at school,” Craig says. “I was an easy target. My dad was black, my brother was mixed-race and I was a scruff with big teeth. The bullies were outside the ground. There were 10 of them, all older than me, buying people’s spare tickets so they could sell them on for a profit.”
What happened next provided his first real insight into Clough’s precious magic. “I told Brian and he marched over. He gave them a couple of his spare tickets. ‘But hey, if you go near this young man again, I will hear about it.’ Then he walked us into the ground, arm in arm. He had this lovely habit where he used to link arms as if to say: ‘They’re with me.’ Those lads never bullied me again.”
The following January, Forest returned to Newcastle in the FA Cup and the two boys were waiting again. That was the first time Clough invited them to watch the match beside him. “Aaron was spat at and told to ‘raspberry off home’ on the walk to the dugout,” Craig says. “The north-east wasn’t exactly the nicest place to grow up if you weren’t white. It was horrible, but amazing at the same time. Being alongside Brian Clough, somehow you knew you were safe.”
A relationship was building. When the team went back to Newcastle in October 1985, almost a year to the day since Clough walked into their lives, the boys were allowed into the dressing room. Forest won 3-0 and Clough knelt down afterwards to take off the players’ boots, as he often did when he thought they had given everything.
“He sat on the dressing-room benches,” Craig says. “He had his back to the wall, arms folded, feet up, legs crossed. Then he turned to me and Aaron and asked the question that, with no exaggeration, changed our lives. ‘You two still off school? I tell you what, I bet your mam would give her eye teeth to get rid of you for a few days. Why don’t we give her a ring and you can stay with us? Get some fresh air and get you fed? Scotsman, get their mam on the phone. Tell her, if it’s OK with her, they’re coming for a holiday.’”
“Scotsman” turned out to be McInally and, though the family didn’t have a phone, they did have an arrangement with their neighbours in times of emergency. This, according to the boys, was one such time. McInally dialled the number from a payphone. “And while we waited for the neighbours, Mr and Mrs Pennock, to knock next door, Jim made it clear he would rather not be wasting everyone’s time,” Craig says. “He was trying not to swear. ‘Surely, your ma can’t agree to this … she has no clue where you’re going … the gaffer is daft even asking me to do this …’”
And of course, it was daft. McInally didn’t even know her name, and vice versa. She was answering the phone to a stranger with a Glaswegian accent. Yet he wanted to pass it on that Brian Clough — yes, Brian Clough — had asked if her boys fancied staying at his place, 150 miles away. No more details than that, really. But Brian had said not to worry, and that he would make sure they got home safely.
It was daft in the extreme.
“Jim hangs up,” Craig recalls. “Then he turns to us. ‘Hey, lads, your ma says she’ll miss you, but have a good time.’”

They were in the back seat of a Mercedes when they arrived at The Elms, the Clough residence in Quarndon, among the hills and greenery of rural Derbyshire. Aaron was 14, Craig was a month from turning 13 and, almost implausibly, Old Big ‘Ead was giving them their own team talk.
“OK lads. Now, the rules. While you’re here, you can call me anything you want, all right? Big Head, Shithouse, Brian, don’t mind. Simon is Simon, Nigel is Nigel. Elizabeth likes to be called Lib, sometimes Libby, but only if she likes you, and you’ll have to work that out for yourselves. Mrs Clough is ALWAYS Mrs Clough and, hey lads, I’m not kidding, if I hear anything else out of those mouths, I’ll knock yer daft bonces together. Now get on up that drive.”
For Craig, it can feel surreal to recall the scene. “The house looked like something you would see in (US TV soap) Dallas. It was so big and white. Everything was so beautiful. The garden was the most beautiful garden I had ever seen. The house had the loveliest, fluffiest green carpet I had ever seen. There was ivy growing up the walls. Even the walk up the drive was special. We walked through the door and it was like a different universe.”
They were woken the next day by a two-time European Cup-winning manager cooking them the best bacon sandwiches they had ever tasted.

Nigel, then 18, and Simon, two years older, introduced themselves with a table tennis tournament in the upstairs games room. Barbara — or Mrs Clough — had big, wavy hair and, as her husband put it, “a smile the size of Stockton High Street”. More importantly, she didn’t seem to mind too much that he had brought back a couple of waifs. If Elizabeth, the eldest of the children, thought it was slightly strange, she didn’t say anything either. “They were all so beautifully normal,” Craig says.
They slept in a room with a view of the garden and enough space for “three or four massive wardrobes”. One, Craig discovered, was filled with Clough’s green sweatshirts. “The blankets smelt beautiful. The pillows were the plumpest pillows I had ever known. It was what we’d call in the north-east proper apple-pie tucking-in material.” A far cry from their sleeping arrangements in Sunderland, where the boys used their Parka jackets as duvets and their dad had a habit of chopping bits off their bunk bed to put on the fire.
The first walk round Quarndon was another eye-opener. “I remember there was a sign saying ‘Vote Tory’ on a telegraph pole,” Craig says. “Brian didn’t like that. ‘Not if I’ve got owt to do with it, you bloody shithouses.’ He took his walking stick and started trying to knock it down. But he couldn’t get it down. So he ordered Aaron to climb up and do it for him.
“We also had to fit in a walk around Kedleston Hall because Brian had told us that, in the countryside, it was a well-known fact that if you rolled around in cow raspberries it would make you stronger. I didn’t know he was joking at first. After that, I’d regularly hear, ‘Hmm, smell that fresh air’ followed by, ‘God knows you need it, Sunderland.’
“He used to call me ‘Sunderland’ or ‘Mackem’. I used to whistle when I was nervous, so another nickname was ‘Ronnie Ronalde’ (a music-hall star famous for his whistling). Or ‘Rigor’. He thought that one up when he came into the lounge and I was sitting in his favourite reclining chair. I had his remote control in my hand and I was eating a Yorkie bar I’d found in the study. Brian walked in with milk and biscuits. ‘Ay up,’ Brian said. ‘Look at Rigor mortis over there! Hey, son! Hey Rigor! Do you need a crane to get you up, son?’”
At first, Craig used to get the Clough boys mixed up until he taught himself that Simon was the one with the moustache. Nigel had made his Forest debut the previous Christmas and was still young enough to keep a collection of mix-tapes in his bedroom. The accents could be confusing for two boys who had never previously left the north-east (for a long time they thought Swain was from “Bacon-head” near Liverpool) and perhaps it was inevitable there would be some awkward settling-in moments.
The time, for example, Clough took them out for dinner with the television commentator Brian Moore. “I wasn’t used to eating posh food,” Craig says. “There was something green and stringy on my potatoes. I found out later it was parsley but, back then, I didn’t know what on earth it was. So when I thought nobody was looking I put my hand to my mouth, spat it out and chucked it under the table.”
Towards the end of the meal, Moore excused himself to go to the toilet … and you can probably guess where this story is going. “I looked down and, bloody hell, Brian Moore has got my half-chewed parsley all over his shoes.”
They ended up staying for a week. They wore Forest kit, or tracksuits, or whatever they could find that vaguely fitted. They went with Clough to the City Ground and they had a run on the pitch. Ian Bowyer, the club captain, took Craig to the optician’s to buy some glasses. Then, back in Quarndon, it didn’t need long to realise something very important. “Mrs Clough deserved an OBE for services to football,” Craig says. “She was Brian’s rock, a beautiful woman with a heart of gold.”
More than anything, they got to see what made Clough tick. Craig doesn’t try to impersonate that distinctive, nasal accent, Mike Yarwood-style, but he does have a brilliant recollection of the way, with every word, Clough’s voice used to get louder and louder until it could make your bones vibrate.
Did he ever feel intimidated? “Never,” he says, “because you knew you were going to do whatever he asked anyway. I’ve seen people visibly grow a couple of inches because of a kind comment from Brian, or sometimes even a look. How could anyone have such a gift?”
They mowed his lawn and swept his drive. They walked his golden retriever, Del. They learned about his love for Frank Sinatra and The Ink Spots. They came to realise he didn’t like many of the politicians on Question Time but that he would bellow with laughter if Richard Pryor was on television, or his other favourite, Bobby Thompson, aka the Little Waster.
At the end of the week, Arsenal rolled into town and there were two young boys sitting anonymously beside Clough in the dugout. Forest won 3-2 with a hat-trick from Peter Davenport and one memory stands out. “The crowd singing, ‘Who’s the raspberry in the black?’ when the referee didn’t give a handball,” Craig says. “Then Brian getting out of the dugout and shaking his fist at the crowd. They stopped swearing straight away.”
It could be described as the best holiday of their lives. Though it was actually the first proper holiday of their lives. Then it was time to say goodbye and Clough sealed two £20 notes in an envelope for their mum, along with a box of chocolates. Barbara had written a letter and sent on some glossy magazines. Nigel and Simon gave the boys a bag of sports gear. Then the train started pulling away and, when they got back to Sunderland, it was Guying season again. “For the first time ever,” Craig says, “we were better dressed than our Guy.”
After that, they arranged holidays to Quarndon whenever they could. It wasn’t straightforward ringing the operator from a payphone, asking to be put through to Brian Clough on reverse charges and expecting to be taken seriously. But that was the routine for a couple of years and, almost always, it ended with an invitation to visit and train tickets being arranged.
Even after Aaron turned 16 and signed up for the army, Craig continued travelling down to Derbyshire on his own.
Except life in Sunderland was increasingly miserable. The Forest pennants on his bedroom wall had gone missing — flogged, almost certainly, to line his dad’s pockets. The big Umbro coat Clough had given Craig to keep warm had also vanished. Gerald had once pushed his wife out of a bedroom window and hit her with a pan. Now he had become further entrenched in drug dealing. He eventually had to leave the north-east and took a painting job in Cambridge, where he was sent to prison for head-butting his supervisor. Craig had had enough.
On the way back from a friendly game against Hearts on September 12, 1988, the Forest bus pulled in at some services on the A1 and the players found him crying in the toilets. Usually, he travelled at the back of the bus with the players. For the rest of the journey he sat beside Clough at the front. Clough made him explain everything and the following day he told Craig to go for a walk while the family called a house meeting. It was a short walk, no further than the end of the drive, before they called him back in. The decision was unanimous: Craig, now 15, was to move in permanently.
“I can remember punching the air,” he says.
The upshot was this: Craig lived with the Clough family for two years. Even now, he still remembers the code — 4-5-2-1 — for Clough’s office and the manager’s telephone numbers. He went with the Cloughs on holiday to Majorca. For a while, he even trained with the first team. And, yes, he frequently asked himself how life could have changed so dramatically. “Every single day,” he says.
Sometimes he used to fret about what the players made of him. But he didn’t need to worry. Stuart Pearce, the leader of the dressing room, put his arm around him and let him know he was liked and accepted. Scot Gemmill taught him how to cross a ball. Nigel surprised him with tickets to see Elton John. Friendships formed: Steve Hodge, Des Walker, Gary Crosby and many others. The players threw Craig in the bath (affectionately) when Forest won the 1989 League Cup final and, unofficially, he played a small part when they won the same competition the following season.

Triumphant Forest after winning the 1989 League Cup final (Photo: David Cannon/Allsport).
In the fourth round, Everton were the opponents and Neville Southall was keeping hold of the ball too much for Clough’s liking. “I had to go up to the linesman on Brian’s behalf,” Craig says. “I was still only a kid, wearing jam-jar glasses. ‘Lino, are you watching their keeper time-wasting?’ Late on, Southall started doing it again — and the referee awarded an indirect free-kick. Lee Chapman scored. One-nil. Thank you very much.”
Clough took them back to Wembley five more times in the following three years. Nigel was one of several England internationals in the team and Craig saw, close-up, their father-son bond, at home and at work.
Clough, he says, treasured one photograph in particular of his son, then 19, scoring his first goal for the club. “It was Nigel going in for a diving header with three defenders around him. Brian would say to people, ‘Tell me the greatest thing about our Nige in this picture.’ Nigel’s eyes were wide open, looking at the ball even when he was risking his head being kicked off. He was so brave, and Brian used to love that … he was unbelievably proud.”
Craig took a job at Simon’s newsagent’s and, at 17, moved into the club’s digs with young up-and-coming players such as Sean Dyche and Gary Charles.
Roy Keane, a £47,000 signing from Cobh Ramblers, was another story. “I loved Keane to bits. We played Spurs in the League Cup semi-final one year. Keane scored the winner. On the way home, there was a card table for Pearcey, Des and some of the other senior players. ‘Hey lads,’ Roy said, poking his head through the gap in the seats, ‘bit of a touchy subject, but I’ve got to ask: Do you ever get a semi on when you are playing? Today, I was celebrating the goal and I looked down and … is that normal?’ There was uproar, absolute uproar! I can still see Pearcey’s face. But I loved Keane. What a player. Bloody hell, the guy used to get turned on just thinking about the game.”
Amid the laughter, there are glimpses of hurt, too. The tragedy is that Aaron died last year, aged 47. Their dad did not live until he was 40. And when it comes to talking about Clough’s death, Craig finds it is hard to keep back the tears.
Eventually he stops trying, and lets it all out.
One memory that always pains him is Clough’s final game, in 1993, and the dismal scene as various people tried to hurry this giant of the sport out of the building. Clough wanted some time alone; others did not want to give him that time.
Then there was the story, never told until now, of Peter Taylor visiting Clough a few years earlier in an attempt to fix their broken relationship. Together, Clough and Taylor, his long-time assistant, had taken an unfashionable, unheralded club to back-to-back European Cups. But the two men had not spoken for years.
“Peter was waiting on the row of seats outside Brian’s office. He wanted to say sorry. Brian came out his office and he twigged. He always used to refer to Carol, his secretary, as ‘Beaut’ or another affectionate term. This was the first time I’d ever heard him call her by her name. ‘Carol, who let him into my ground? Firstly, get him out. Secondly, whoever let him in, get them fired.’ Then he went in and the door closed.”
Clough, he suspects, deeply regretted it. The relationship was never fixed and, though Craig has too many fond memories to dwell on this issue, he also believes it is no coincidence that Clough’s drinking accelerated after Taylor’s death in 1990.
Again, it is a difficult, emotional subject. “I was in the kitchen with Brian when he heard the news. The phone rang. I didn’t know who it was. But I could tell something was wrong. Brian didn’t say a word and then he dropped the receiver. It was just dangling on the cord. Brian left it there. He went for a walk and when he came back four hours later he was crying.”
His regard for the Clough family can be gauged by his status these days as a keen follower of Burton Albion, the team where Nigel is the manager and Simon — described by Craig as a “brilliant talent-spotter” — leads the scouting network. Nigel previously had four years at Derby County and on the dcfcfans.uk internet forum there used to be one poster, in particular, who backed him through thick and thin. Username: Ronnie Ronalde.
Craig is 46 now, living in Derbyshire, where he is writing a book about his experiences and setting up a charity to help underprivileged children. He previously worked in Poland as the director of an executive search firm and, even then, he would fly back to watch Burton play.
“All Brian ever wanted — all his family ever wanted — was a better life for a kid who had no life before that,” he says. “They taught me how to talk. They taught me how to mix. They taught me how to ask questions and to be confident in front of anybody. They gave me all that, and more. I owe them everything.”
It is the kind of story that deserves a happy ending. And it brings to mind one of the great man’s quotes — or, at least, a variation of it.
The greatest Brian Clough story of all time? For two boys from Sunderland asking for pennies for the Guy, definitely in the top one.

Daniel Taylor is a senior writer for The Athletic and has been named Football Journalist of the Year for the last four years. He was previously the chief football writer for The Guardian and The Observer and spent nearly 20 years working for the two titles. Daniel has written five books on the sport. Follow Daniel on Twitter @DTathletic.
Dan
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 11921
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 12:26 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Captain Cunno » Tue Aug 24, 2021 4:25 am

Dan wrote:I know a lot of people showed an interest into how Broomo started following the Stags after Nigel became our manager. Well here’s an article that came out a couple of years ago that will answer a few questions. I hope Broomo doesn’t mind me posting this. It’s such a heartwarming story. Grab a cuppa and give it a read.

The remarkable tale of two boys who went begging for pennies and ended up living with Brian Clough
Daniel TaylorOct 14, 2019
It began with two boys from a council estate in Sunderland — a “couple of scruffies”, to use their own description — trying to raise a few quid from what kids of a certain generation will know as “Guying”. Bonfire Night was approaching. School was finished for the day and the boys were positioned strategically with their Guy Fawkes doll outside the best hotel in town.
The date was October 19, 1984. They had made their Guy from a pillowcase stuffed with newspaper, a school jumper and a pair of battered old corduroys. The face was drawn on with their mum’s lipstick. Their mantra was “Penny for the Guy?” and, to begin with, 11-year-old Craig Bromfield and his 13-year-old brother, Aaron, didn’t realise they might have hit the jackpot when a group of men came into view wearing red tracksuit tops, with Adidas stripes on the sleeves and “some kind of flower” on the chest.
The flower was actually the tree of the Nottingham Forest crest. Brian Clough’s team were staying at the Seaburn Hotel, preparing for a game against Newcastle United, and it turned out professional footballers could be a lot more generous with their money than the locals. And certainly a lot less frightening than the stranger — head shaven, bovver boots, eyes filled with hate — who had terrorised them earlier that evening, aiming a kick at their Guy, for no other reason than Aaron was mixed race.
Kenny Swain, the Forest left-back, was the first to take an interest and did not seem to mind when one of the boys asked if they were a basketball team. Swain, a European Cup winner with Aston Villa two years earlier, explained who they were. He apologised for not having any spare change and he asked them to wait while he went into the hotel to see what he could find.
When he came back out, he had a sheet of paper filled with autographs. “He told us he was sorry he hadn’t been able to get everyone but some of the players had gone to bed,” Craig, speaking to The Athletic 35 years later, recalls. “He promised that if we went back in the morning he would get the rest. And he gave us a £5 note. If I’m honest, I spent more time looking at that than the autographs. It was the first time anyone had ever given me a fiver.”
At 7.30am the next day, the boys were back. Clough was on his morning walk along the seafront and, if you were to try to make sense of the following chain of events, it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say it is the kind of story that should probably be turned into a film. And for Craig, in particular, it was the beginning of a relationship that has shaped his entire life.
A relationship — crazy as it sounds — that led to him being taken in by the Clough family, living under their roof as one of their own. Brian, Barbara, their sons, Nigel and Simon, and daughter, Elizabeth. And Craig: a sixth, unofficial member of the family, saved from a difficult, often traumatic childhood at a time in his life when he badly needed some direction and guidance.
The strangest thing, perhaps, is that a library’s worth of books has been written about Clough — and none tell this story.
Clough wrote two autobiographies and spent virtually his entire career as the most quotable man in the business. Yet you won’t find a single word from him talking about what you are going to read here. Some things, plainly, mattered more to him than publicity or self-promotion. Which tells you a lot about the man when, at the heart of it, lies some extraordinary kindness. Not just from Clough, but his entire family.
It is some story, though, and it certainly isn’t easy for Craig, all these years on, to explain how he could go from asking for spare pennies on a street corner, living in an area where the poverty could make you weep, to moving in with the most famous manager in football.
Though maybe it helped, going back to their first encounter outside the Seaburn, that he made sure to refer to “Mr Clough” when he inquired whether Swain was awake, too. Craig was a year out of primary school, small for his age, with buck teeth, fluffy hair and failing eyesight. Aaron had big, brown eyes and a sunrise of a smile. And if there was one thing Clough always appreciated it was good manners.
“Have you two rag-tags had any breakfast yet? And where’s your coats? You’ll catch your bloody death. What’s your mam doing sending you out like that? Now come inside. Hurry up, before I change my mind.”
For two boys from Southwick, walking through the Seaburn’s revolving doors was like setting foot in a different world.
Southwick, on the north banks of the River Wear, was a hard-faced place to grow up in the 1980s. A “craphole”, to use Craig’s description. Though positively upmarket compared to their old place in Barclay Court and the now-demolished slums where his first memories were of “our Joanne (his sister) crying, cockroaches and darkness, but not much else.”
Their dad, a Jamaican-Geordie called Gerald, was a professional sign-writer. But he had a reputation. He was a hard man who used to shine his muscles with olive oil for added effect. He was also a thief, a low-level drug dealer and a magnet for trouble in a deprived area, selling bags of cannabis. He had a temper and when he came home drunk or in a bad mood, even sometimes if he had lost a game of pool at the Transport Club, he regularly used to hand out beatings.
“Never us,” Craig says, “but several shades out of our mam and for the smallest of reasons like bones in his fish, or his egg-and-tomato sandwiches being soggy, or if she hadn’t been able to sell enough brass off the walls to our neighbours so he could have a decent night out.”
He was their dad — strictly speaking, Craig’s stepdad — and they loved him. Even when they had to spend time in children’s homes, or a refuge against domestic violence, they still loved him. But it wasn’t a particularly happy childhood growing up in a cramped terraced house — two adults, four kids, two Alsatians — with not enough money for toilet paper sometimes, one set of clothes to last an entire week and virtually no belongings.
More than once, the electricity was cut off because they hadn’t paid their bills. The water, too. Jim McInally, Forest’s right-back at the time, remembers Craig (on the left in the photo above) and Aaron (right) as “two filthy kids … grubby little scallywags who looked like they hadn’t been near water in years.”
Perhaps Clough saw that, too. Maybe they reminded him of boys from his own childhood in Middlesbrough. Or, as he told the pair later, perhaps it was because he thought they relaxed the players, with their north-east accents and boyish innocence.
Whatever it was, Clough invited them in for breakfast and, once they had finished eating, he wanted to know if they liked football. “It was Kenny Swain who told us,” Craig says. “He said ‘the Gaffer’ had said it was OK if we wanted to go to the game. They would take us on the team bus and get us tickets. I didn’t know who ‘the Gaffer’ was — all I could think was the TV series with the big fat guy (Bill Maynard, who starred in an early 1980s sitcom with that title) — but there was no way we were going to say no.”
If the adventure was to end there, it would still have been a great story. Not many boys that age could boast they had dined with Brian Clough or that he had let them travel on the team bus. The game finished 1-1 and the boys watched from the stands at St James’ Park, risking hypothermia in their T-shirts, frozen to the bone.
The next morning, Craig sent a postcard to Clough to say thank you and, within a few days, a letter came back with a Nottingham postmark. Clough told them to work hard at school, look after their mum and come to watch Forest again some time. It was typed by Clough’s secretary, Carol, but signed by the manager with his favourite payoff: “Be Good.”
Whether Clough imagined his new acquaintances would be waiting for him outside Roker Park, when Forest took on Sunderland in the League Cup a few weeks later, was another matter. But his paternal instincts quickly kicked in when he saw the boys. “I was bullied at school,” Craig says. “I was an easy target. My dad was black, my brother was mixed-race and I was a scruff with big teeth. The bullies were outside the ground. There were 10 of them, all older than me, buying people’s spare tickets so they could sell them on for a profit.”
What happened next provided his first real insight into Clough’s precious magic. “I told Brian and he marched over. He gave them a couple of his spare tickets. ‘But hey, if you go near this young man again, I will hear about it.’ Then he walked us into the ground, arm in arm. He had this lovely habit where he used to link arms as if to say: ‘They’re with me.’ Those lads never bullied me again.”
The following January, Forest returned to Newcastle in the FA Cup and the two boys were waiting again. That was the first time Clough invited them to watch the match beside him. “Aaron was spat at and told to ‘raspberry off home’ on the walk to the dugout,” Craig says. “The north-east wasn’t exactly the nicest place to grow up if you weren’t white. It was horrible, but amazing at the same time. Being alongside Brian Clough, somehow you knew you were safe.”
A relationship was building. When the team went back to Newcastle in October 1985, almost a year to the day since Clough walked into their lives, the boys were allowed into the dressing room. Forest won 3-0 and Clough knelt down afterwards to take off the players’ boots, as he often did when he thought they had given everything.
“He sat on the dressing-room benches,” Craig says. “He had his back to the wall, arms folded, feet up, legs crossed. Then he turned to me and Aaron and asked the question that, with no exaggeration, changed our lives. ‘You two still off school? I tell you what, I bet your mam would give her eye teeth to get rid of you for a few days. Why don’t we give her a ring and you can stay with us? Get some fresh air and get you fed? Scotsman, get their mam on the phone. Tell her, if it’s OK with her, they’re coming for a holiday.’”
“Scotsman” turned out to be McInally and, though the family didn’t have a phone, they did have an arrangement with their neighbours in times of emergency. This, according to the boys, was one such time. McInally dialled the number from a payphone. “And while we waited for the neighbours, Mr and Mrs Pennock, to knock next door, Jim made it clear he would rather not be wasting everyone’s time,” Craig says. “He was trying not to swear. ‘Surely, your ma can’t agree to this … she has no clue where you’re going … the gaffer is daft even asking me to do this …’”
And of course, it was daft. McInally didn’t even know her name, and vice versa. She was answering the phone to a stranger with a Glaswegian accent. Yet he wanted to pass it on that Brian Clough — yes, Brian Clough — had asked if her boys fancied staying at his place, 150 miles away. No more details than that, really. But Brian had said not to worry, and that he would make sure they got home safely.
It was daft in the extreme.
“Jim hangs up,” Craig recalls. “Then he turns to us. ‘Hey, lads, your ma says she’ll miss you, but have a good time.’”

They were in the back seat of a Mercedes when they arrived at The Elms, the Clough residence in Quarndon, among the hills and greenery of rural Derbyshire. Aaron was 14, Craig was a month from turning 13 and, almost implausibly, Old Big ‘Ead was giving them their own team talk.
“OK lads. Now, the rules. While you’re here, you can call me anything you want, all right? Big Head, Shithouse, Brian, don’t mind. Simon is Simon, Nigel is Nigel. Elizabeth likes to be called Lib, sometimes Libby, but only if she likes you, and you’ll have to work that out for yourselves. Mrs Clough is ALWAYS Mrs Clough and, hey lads, I’m not kidding, if I hear anything else out of those mouths, I’ll knock yer daft bonces together. Now get on up that drive.”
For Craig, it can feel surreal to recall the scene. “The house looked like something you would see in (US TV soap) Dallas. It was so big and white. Everything was so beautiful. The garden was the most beautiful garden I had ever seen. The house had the loveliest, fluffiest green carpet I had ever seen. There was ivy growing up the walls. Even the walk up the drive was special. We walked through the door and it was like a different universe.”
They were woken the next day by a two-time European Cup-winning manager cooking them the best bacon sandwiches they had ever tasted.

Nigel, then 18, and Simon, two years older, introduced themselves with a table tennis tournament in the upstairs games room. Barbara — or Mrs Clough — had big, wavy hair and, as her husband put it, “a smile the size of Stockton High Street”. More importantly, she didn’t seem to mind too much that he had brought back a couple of waifs. If Elizabeth, the eldest of the children, thought it was slightly strange, she didn’t say anything either. “They were all so beautifully normal,” Craig says.
They slept in a room with a view of the garden and enough space for “three or four massive wardrobes”. One, Craig discovered, was filled with Clough’s green sweatshirts. “The blankets smelt beautiful. The pillows were the plumpest pillows I had ever known. It was what we’d call in the north-east proper apple-pie tucking-in material.” A far cry from their sleeping arrangements in Sunderland, where the boys used their Parka jackets as duvets and their dad had a habit of chopping bits off their bunk bed to put on the fire.
The first walk round Quarndon was another eye-opener. “I remember there was a sign saying ‘Vote Tory’ on a telegraph pole,” Craig says. “Brian didn’t like that. ‘Not if I’ve got owt to do with it, you bloody shithouses.’ He took his walking stick and started trying to knock it down. But he couldn’t get it down. So he ordered Aaron to climb up and do it for him.
“We also had to fit in a walk around Kedleston Hall because Brian had told us that, in the countryside, it was a well-known fact that if you rolled around in cow raspberries it would make you stronger. I didn’t know he was joking at first. After that, I’d regularly hear, ‘Hmm, smell that fresh air’ followed by, ‘God knows you need it, Sunderland.’
“He used to call me ‘Sunderland’ or ‘Mackem’. I used to whistle when I was nervous, so another nickname was ‘Ronnie Ronalde’ (a music-hall star famous for his whistling). Or ‘Rigor’. He thought that one up when he came into the lounge and I was sitting in his favourite reclining chair. I had his remote control in my hand and I was eating a Yorkie bar I’d found in the study. Brian walked in with milk and biscuits. ‘Ay up,’ Brian said. ‘Look at Rigor mortis over there! Hey, son! Hey Rigor! Do you need a crane to get you up, son?’”
At first, Craig used to get the Clough boys mixed up until he taught himself that Simon was the one with the moustache. Nigel had made his Forest debut the previous Christmas and was still young enough to keep a collection of mix-tapes in his bedroom. The accents could be confusing for two boys who had never previously left the north-east (for a long time they thought Swain was from “Bacon-head” near Liverpool) and perhaps it was inevitable there would be some awkward settling-in moments.
The time, for example, Clough took them out for dinner with the television commentator Brian Moore. “I wasn’t used to eating posh food,” Craig says. “There was something green and stringy on my potatoes. I found out later it was parsley but, back then, I didn’t know what on earth it was. So when I thought nobody was looking I put my hand to my mouth, spat it out and chucked it under the table.”
Towards the end of the meal, Moore excused himself to go to the toilet … and you can probably guess where this story is going. “I looked down and, bloody hell, Brian Moore has got my half-chewed parsley all over his shoes.”
They ended up staying for a week. They wore Forest kit, or tracksuits, or whatever they could find that vaguely fitted. They went with Clough to the City Ground and they had a run on the pitch. Ian Bowyer, the club captain, took Craig to the optician’s to buy some glasses. Then, back in Quarndon, it didn’t need long to realise something very important. “Mrs Clough deserved an OBE for services to football,” Craig says. “She was Brian’s rock, a beautiful woman with a heart of gold.”
More than anything, they got to see what made Clough tick. Craig doesn’t try to impersonate that distinctive, nasal accent, Mike Yarwood-style, but he does have a brilliant recollection of the way, with every word, Clough’s voice used to get louder and louder until it could make your bones vibrate.
Did he ever feel intimidated? “Never,” he says, “because you knew you were going to do whatever he asked anyway. I’ve seen people visibly grow a couple of inches because of a kind comment from Brian, or sometimes even a look. How could anyone have such a gift?”
They mowed his lawn and swept his drive. They walked his golden retriever, Del. They learned about his love for Frank Sinatra and The Ink Spots. They came to realise he didn’t like many of the politicians on Question Time but that he would bellow with laughter if Richard Pryor was on television, or his other favourite, Bobby Thompson, aka the Little Waster.
At the end of the week, Arsenal rolled into town and there were two young boys sitting anonymously beside Clough in the dugout. Forest won 3-2 with a hat-trick from Peter Davenport and one memory stands out. “The crowd singing, ‘Who’s the raspberry in the black?’ when the referee didn’t give a handball,” Craig says. “Then Brian getting out of the dugout and shaking his fist at the crowd. They stopped swearing straight away.”
It could be described as the best holiday of their lives. Though it was actually the first proper holiday of their lives. Then it was time to say goodbye and Clough sealed two £20 notes in an envelope for their mum, along with a box of chocolates. Barbara had written a letter and sent on some glossy magazines. Nigel and Simon gave the boys a bag of sports gear. Then the train started pulling away and, when they got back to Sunderland, it was Guying season again. “For the first time ever,” Craig says, “we were better dressed than our Guy.”
After that, they arranged holidays to Quarndon whenever they could. It wasn’t straightforward ringing the operator from a payphone, asking to be put through to Brian Clough on reverse charges and expecting to be taken seriously. But that was the routine for a couple of years and, almost always, it ended with an invitation to visit and train tickets being arranged.
Even after Aaron turned 16 and signed up for the army, Craig continued travelling down to Derbyshire on his own.
Except life in Sunderland was increasingly miserable. The Forest pennants on his bedroom wall had gone missing — flogged, almost certainly, to line his dad’s pockets. The big Umbro coat Clough had given Craig to keep warm had also vanished. Gerald had once pushed his wife out of a bedroom window and hit her with a pan. Now he had become further entrenched in drug dealing. He eventually had to leave the north-east and took a painting job in Cambridge, where he was sent to prison for head-butting his supervisor. Craig had had enough.
On the way back from a friendly game against Hearts on September 12, 1988, the Forest bus pulled in at some services on the A1 and the players found him crying in the toilets. Usually, he travelled at the back of the bus with the players. For the rest of the journey he sat beside Clough at the front. Clough made him explain everything and the following day he told Craig to go for a walk while the family called a house meeting. It was a short walk, no further than the end of the drive, before they called him back in. The decision was unanimous: Craig, now 15, was to move in permanently.
“I can remember punching the air,” he says.
The upshot was this: Craig lived with the Clough family for two years. Even now, he still remembers the code — 4-5-2-1 — for Clough’s office and the manager’s telephone numbers. He went with the Cloughs on holiday to Majorca. For a while, he even trained with the first team. And, yes, he frequently asked himself how life could have changed so dramatically. “Every single day,” he says.
Sometimes he used to fret about what the players made of him. But he didn’t need to worry. Stuart Pearce, the leader of the dressing room, put his arm around him and let him know he was liked and accepted. Scot Gemmill taught him how to cross a ball. Nigel surprised him with tickets to see Elton John. Friendships formed: Steve Hodge, Des Walker, Gary Crosby and many others. The players threw Craig in the bath (affectionately) when Forest won the 1989 League Cup final and, unofficially, he played a small part when they won the same competition the following season.

Triumphant Forest after winning the 1989 League Cup final (Photo: David Cannon/Allsport).
In the fourth round, Everton were the opponents and Neville Southall was keeping hold of the ball too much for Clough’s liking. “I had to go up to the linesman on Brian’s behalf,” Craig says. “I was still only a kid, wearing jam-jar glasses. ‘Lino, are you watching their keeper time-wasting?’ Late on, Southall started doing it again — and the referee awarded an indirect free-kick. Lee Chapman scored. One-nil. Thank you very much.”
Clough took them back to Wembley five more times in the following three years. Nigel was one of several England internationals in the team and Craig saw, close-up, their father-son bond, at home and at work.
Clough, he says, treasured one photograph in particular of his son, then 19, scoring his first goal for the club. “It was Nigel going in for a diving header with three defenders around him. Brian would say to people, ‘Tell me the greatest thing about our Nige in this picture.’ Nigel’s eyes were wide open, looking at the ball even when he was risking his head being kicked off. He was so brave, and Brian used to love that … he was unbelievably proud.”
Craig took a job at Simon’s newsagent’s and, at 17, moved into the club’s digs with young up-and-coming players such as Sean Dyche and Gary Charles.
Roy Keane, a £47,000 signing from Cobh Ramblers, was another story. “I loved Keane to bits. We played Spurs in the League Cup semi-final one year. Keane scored the winner. On the way home, there was a card table for Pearcey, Des and some of the other senior players. ‘Hey lads,’ Roy said, poking his head through the gap in the seats, ‘bit of a touchy subject, but I’ve got to ask: Do you ever get a semi on when you are playing? Today, I was celebrating the goal and I looked down and … is that normal?’ There was uproar, absolute uproar! I can still see Pearcey’s face. But I loved Keane. What a player. Bloody hell, the guy used to get turned on just thinking about the game.”
Amid the laughter, there are glimpses of hurt, too. The tragedy is that Aaron died last year, aged 47. Their dad did not live until he was 40. And when it comes to talking about Clough’s death, Craig finds it is hard to keep back the tears.
Eventually he stops trying, and lets it all out.
One memory that always pains him is Clough’s final game, in 1993, and the dismal scene as various people tried to hurry this giant of the sport out of the building. Clough wanted some time alone; others did not want to give him that time.
Then there was the story, never told until now, of Peter Taylor visiting Clough a few years earlier in an attempt to fix their broken relationship. Together, Clough and Taylor, his long-time assistant, had taken an unfashionable, unheralded club to back-to-back European Cups. But the two men had not spoken for years.
“Peter was waiting on the row of seats outside Brian’s office. He wanted to say sorry. Brian came out his office and he twigged. He always used to refer to Carol, his secretary, as ‘Beaut’ or another affectionate term. This was the first time I’d ever heard him call her by her name. ‘Carol, who let him into my ground? Firstly, get him out. Secondly, whoever let him in, get them fired.’ Then he went in and the door closed.”
Clough, he suspects, deeply regretted it. The relationship was never fixed and, though Craig has too many fond memories to dwell on this issue, he also believes it is no coincidence that Clough’s drinking accelerated after Taylor’s death in 1990.
Again, it is a difficult, emotional subject. “I was in the kitchen with Brian when he heard the news. The phone rang. I didn’t know who it was. But I could tell something was wrong. Brian didn’t say a word and then he dropped the receiver. It was just dangling on the cord. Brian left it there. He went for a walk and when he came back four hours later he was crying.”
His regard for the Clough family can be gauged by his status these days as a keen follower of Burton Albion, the team where Nigel is the manager and Simon — described by Craig as a “brilliant talent-spotter” — leads the scouting network. Nigel previously had four years at Derby County and on the dcfcfans.uk internet forum there used to be one poster, in particular, who backed him through thick and thin. Username: Ronnie Ronalde.
Craig is 46 now, living in Derbyshire, where he is writing a book about his experiences and setting up a charity to help underprivileged children. He previously worked in Poland as the director of an executive search firm and, even then, he would fly back to watch Burton play.
“All Brian ever wanted — all his family ever wanted — was a better life for a kid who had no life before that,” he says. “They taught me how to talk. They taught me how to mix. They taught me how to ask questions and to be confident in front of anybody. They gave me all that, and more. I owe them everything.”
It is the kind of story that deserves a happy ending. And it brings to mind one of the great man’s quotes — or, at least, a variation of it.
The greatest Brian Clough story of all time? For two boys from Sunderland asking for pennies for the Guy, definitely in the top one.

Daniel Taylor is a senior writer for The Athletic and has been named Football Journalist of the Year for the last four years. He was previously the chief football writer for The Guardian and The Observer and spent nearly 20 years working for the two titles. Daniel has written five books on the sport. Follow Daniel on Twitter @DTathletic.


Nice read.
These are my opinions , if you don't like them I have others...
User avatar
Captain Cunno
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 5772
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 1:23 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Clockworktarzan » Tue Aug 24, 2021 6:46 am

What an amazing insight... to an incredible man.
Great read!!
"Winning doesn't really matter, as long as you win." - Vinnie Jones
User avatar
Clockworktarzan
Assistant Manager
Assistant Manager
 
Posts: 1377
Joined: Mon Mar 12, 2012 7:27 pm
Location: Nottingham High Security Unit

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby bellwhiff » Tue Aug 24, 2021 7:02 am

Great story.

Please don’t quote it though. My thumbs can’t take it. :)
Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier...

Samuel Johnson
User avatar
bellwhiff
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 19498
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 7:14 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby yellowstagsfan » Tue Aug 24, 2021 7:49 am

Absolutely fantastic read. Thank you for that
User avatar
yellowstagsfan
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 1883
Joined: Sun Mar 23, 2014 1:01 pm
Location: Just over border (Derbyshire)

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Chrisuknottm » Tue Aug 24, 2021 7:53 am

Absolutely totally engrossed from start to finish. Thanks so much.
Chrisuknottm
Assistant Manager
Assistant Manager
 
Posts: 1370
Joined: Sun Apr 22, 2018 3:32 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Opus » Tue Aug 24, 2021 8:02 am

A really lovely story
Opus
Subs Bench
Subs Bench
 
Posts: 464
Joined: Mon Jul 16, 2012 4:04 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby oldweststander » Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:40 am

That's the longest and the best post I have ever read on Stagsnet.

A fitting tribute to a great man.
oldweststander
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 5372
Joined: Sun Aug 25, 2013 11:17 am

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Martin Shaw » Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:46 am

Wonderful story.

It has been mentioned before on here, but Broomo has written a book and it is out later this year. I am looking forward to reading it
https://www.waterstones.com/book/be-goo ... 0008466862
"Four points clear as Lincoln are McCaffreyised", CHAD headline, April 1975
Martin Shaw
Site Admin
 
Posts: 28971
Joined: Sun Jul 13, 2008 6:20 pm
Location: West London

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Herts Stag » Tue Aug 24, 2021 10:18 am

Very touching. What a man Mr Clough was. His son possesses a lot of his characteristics. we are lucky to have him.
Herts Stag
Subs Bench
Subs Bench
 
Posts: 671
Joined: Sat Aug 08, 2009 6:39 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby bear 73 » Tue Aug 24, 2021 10:30 am

Thanks Dan a good read, i always like to read what Broomo has to say, and i am grateful he had my back at Derby, Sheff Utd, Burton,and Mansfield, we do not always agree but football is the winner, And for different reasons we both admire Nigel Clough and his honesty and integrity and he respects all fans, Coming to Mansfield has been Brilliant, Martin has been super
helping me with ifollow and he and Dean bring games to me i cannot attend, Stag fans have been very vocal, and though i am now watching football at my lowest level, my passion for the club and matches are as big now as they were 60 years ago. I only met Broomo once but i am over the moon, that he travels all the way from Sunderland to watch games,
So his passion for football as not diminished, A nice read Dan as we get over our home defeat, football is not only about Matches but the community and fans
bear 73
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 2026
Joined: Fri Nov 06, 2020 4:01 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby berryhillstag » Tue Aug 24, 2021 10:43 am

Thanks Dan for sharing this story. I was engrossed from start to finish. A brilliant read. I rarely post on here but felt I had to write something as it was that good.
Last edited by berryhillstag on Tue Aug 24, 2021 10:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
berryhillstag
Youth Team
Youth Team
 
Posts: 27
Joined: Mon Jun 13, 2011 5:26 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Wilfred » Tue Aug 24, 2021 10:43 am

Martin Shaw wrote:Wonderful story.

It has been mentioned before on here, but Broomo has written a book and it is out later this year. I am looking forward to reading it
https://www.waterstones.com/book/be-goo ... 0008466862

It's on my list too, Martin.

And judging by the tears I shed reading the piece put on by Dan, the reading of the book may mean I don't pee for a week!
Pessimists are never disappointed.
Wilfred
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 1660
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2009 2:39 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Captain Cunno » Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:29 am

bellwhiff wrote:Great story.

Please don’t quote it though. My thumbs can’t take it. :)


Guffaw :lol:
These are my opinions , if you don't like them I have others...
User avatar
Captain Cunno
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 5772
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 1:23 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby MOTG » Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:43 am

What a fantastic read and touching story. Thanks Dan.
MOTG
Subs Bench
Subs Bench
 
Posts: 613
Joined: Sun Apr 08, 2018 9:52 am

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby steiner » Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:54 am

Heartwarming incredible story.. Cloughie was a one in a billion.. Never forgot where he came from.. I feel blessed that I got to see his and Taylor all conquering Forest back in the late 70s.
User avatar
steiner
First Team
First Team
 
Posts: 843
Joined: Sat Aug 15, 2009 7:54 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby yorkshire stag » Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:58 am

lovely insight into a very special man, the like i hope is rubbing off on his lad
Our time will come
User avatar
yorkshire stag
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 14617
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 7:35 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Amberheart » Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:31 pm

Such a heart warming story of great kindness & love .
KTF !
User avatar
Amberheart
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 3735
Joined: Thu Dec 19, 2013 4:31 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby yellowstagsfan » Tue Aug 24, 2021 4:02 pm

steiner wrote:Heartwarming incredible story.. Cloughie was a one in a billion.. Never forgot where he came from.. I feel blessed that I got to see his and Taylor all conquering Forest back in the late 70s.

Also never forgot his exciting Derby sides before that. Great man !
User avatar
yellowstagsfan
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 1883
Joined: Sun Mar 23, 2014 1:01 pm
Location: Just over border (Derbyshire)

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Vice President » Tue Aug 24, 2021 4:25 pm

What a fantastic story. Cloughie was a remarkable man.

I have really enjoyed Broomo's contributions to this forum - and I was dismayed at the way some people treated him & Bear. We are a community and are all on the same side. We may have different opinions. But please let's be nice to each other and encourage (not discourage) people from enhancing our great forum.
Vice President
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 2248
Joined: Thu Feb 12, 2015 7:59 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby gazza1988 » Tue Aug 24, 2021 8:05 pm

That article shows all those who couldn't grasp the concept behind following a manager rather than a specific club why some do.
post meanings:
I know what I'm doing
Just guessing
You're an idiot and I'm poking you with a stick
User avatar
gazza1988
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 18200
Joined: Sat Aug 08, 2009 5:23 pm
Location: Beeston, Nottingham

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby HU7stag » Tue Aug 24, 2021 8:06 pm

Wow what an engrossing and emotional story. Thanks for sharing.

'Old big head' was such a respected and well liked person in our household when I was growing up.

I'll most definitely be looking forward to the release of Craig's book and hope he continues to make his insightful posts on here.
.
User avatar
HU7stag
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 4437
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 7:26 pm
Location: Hull

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby garlic » Tue Aug 24, 2021 8:45 pm

Thanks Dan, great read and a wonderful story made even better by being true.
garlic
First Team
First Team
 
Posts: 940
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2010 7:40 pm

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby ParisStag » Wed Aug 25, 2021 1:31 am

Vice President wrote:What a fantastic story. Cloughie was a remarkable man.

I have really enjoyed Broomo's contributions to this forum - and I was dismayed at the way some people treated him & Bear. We are a community and are all on the same side. We may have different opinions. But please let's be nice to each other and encourage (not discourage) people from enhancing our great forum.


Completely agree. The people who have done that know who they are and they're a hundred times less welcome here than Broomo and Bear.

Great story and I'm so glad we have Nigel. His recent interview and the comment about Hewitt being good mates with the Bradford winger and not wanting to tackle him, was straight from his dad's book!
User avatar
ParisStag
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 6294
Joined: Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:13 pm
Location: Nottingham

Re: Broomo’s story

Postby Sandy Pate Best Stag » Wed Aug 25, 2021 5:53 am

Yes a heartwarming story and shows that football is not just about flash cars and big salaries.

In some ways it reminds me of ‘Marvellous’ which is the story of Neil Baldwin and Stoke City FC and his encounters with Lou Macari. That was made into a play by the BBC and is one of the best pieces of tv I’ve ever seen.

I would say that Broomo’s story has the potential to be just as successful at least and I wish him well. The way that the Stoke fans took to Neil is a lesson to us all and I would recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it to have a look, it’s available on the internet on YouTube and Prime.

I hope your book is just as successful Broomo and hopefully you will get to appear in the film.
Hello! Hello! We are the North Stand Boys.
Sandy Pate Best Stag
Manager
Manager
 
Posts: 7133
Joined: Tue Aug 18, 2009 3:37 pm

Next

Return to Stagsnet Main Discussion Forum

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: awalkinthepark, BH_Stag, Bing [Bot], Captain Cunno, CassellsCap, George34, IAmTheStag, lifestags, mans_field, Sandy Pate Best Stag, Scothie the Stag, Stags Head Stags and 165 guests