I walk up the drive and tell Brian, who marches out, looking for the man. For the next three days, there are journalists and photographers in the garden. 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. I love Brian Clough, he was the Forest manager when I was growing up. I might romanticise my childhood memories but he was one of the best things to happen to the club. For him to have saved my life, to have welcomed me into his heart and home, and given me open access to everything, and then for me to do that. What kind of person am I?” He answers his own question. “No kind, no decent person would do that.”

The 2nd reason I wrote it (maybe selfishly because of guilt but also because it's my true charachter) is because I would love to somehow be able to help a kid or two who is in the kind of situation I was as a child, have a better life. What happened at that point is that I flipped. I realised the gift that he had given me. I changed as a person. I went from this scruffy little kid who was bullied by everybody to a managing director of three companies over in Warsaw earning six-figure salaries." I really can see your point of view and agree with 99% of it but I hope this at least explains my thinking. Franz Carr taps me on the shoulder and says: “Hang on a second, son. Sit down and shut up, this is something different.” We are all ushered into the dressing rooms. Somebody says there has been a death. Later, we are told five people have been killed and that the club gymnasium is being turned into a morgue. Brian was at the front of the Forest bus, slumped in his seat. The deaths had left him distraughtI started it 16 years ago, but could never finish it,” Craig says. “The final chapter was too difficult.” Gradually, as the story unfolds, I begin to realise why. If Brian hadn’t done what he did,” Craig says now, “I wouldn’t have had a life, because I would have been in prison.”

He would send newspaper cuttings of his success in Poland to the Clough family, perhaps in the hope that they would feel some pride and vindication in their decision. He was not so much proving them wrong but proving them right for giving him that chance. 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 was the catalyst for this book. "I started writing it as a thank-you letter to Mrs Clough and it just transformed." He asked permission to write it, but knows they are a private family. "A lot of people have said things that did not need to be said. I hope that I haven't.The next day, I went out to take Del the dog for a walk when someone emerged from behind a clump of trees.

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. It's rare to hear anything new about someone like Brian Clough, one of football's true giants. Rarer still that it can make you laugh and cry in equal measure. Quite simply, it's an amazing story." – Jeff Brown, BBC Look North 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.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. Or maybe it will come when he can see how the money raised from this book is helping others. Children just like him whose lives were transformed with an act of kindness.

It was a tough upbringing. "I never felt safe in my own home." His father, technically his stepfather, would beat his mother and had been a somewhat notorious figure. "He did not exactly make it easy on himself or us by becoming a drug dealer," says Craig. But before all that this is a story of hope where there had seemed to be none. A tale of two urchins, Craig only 11, asking for a penny for the Guy as Bonfire Night approached, only to stumble upon the Nottingham Forest team at their hotel preparing to face Newcastle. Life with the Cloughs in the Derbyshire village of Quarndon was idyllic with occasional reminders of the fame that once saw Clough called out by Muhammad Ali. "Underneath it all he was normal. He travelled normally, he cooked for us. He treated us like sons."

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.