Brian Clough

After a managerial career full of clashes, controversy and cups, it's easy to forget that Brian Clough was also one of the most prolific goalscorers ever to grace the Football League.

Born in Middlesbrough, he started out at non-league Billingham Synthonia, before spending two years in the RAF on National Service. In 1955, he joined his home-town club and set about scoring a lot of goals very quickly. In 213 League games for Boro, he found the net 197 times - practically a goal a game.

In 1961, he moved to Sunderland in a £45,000 deal. At Roker Park, he kept up his amazing strike-rate, netting 54 goals in 61 games before a crippling ligament injury on Boxing Day 1962 ended his playing days, and started an even more remarkable story.

Despite regular calls for his selection, Clough made just two appearances for England, against Wales and Sweden, but on both occasions he failed to replicate his club form. With Bobby Charlton and Jimmy Greaves banging them in, he never got another chance to prove himself on the international stage.

Few football managers have had a critically-acclaimed film made about them. But then, few football managers have ever been quite like Brian Clough.

His managerial career began with him driving the team bus at Hartlepool. It peaked with him taking a small unfashionable club to the European Cup final twice and although it ended in tears and relegation, he is still revered as possibly the finest, and definitely the most individual manager this country has ever produced.

In tandem with Peter Taylor, his right-hand man until an acrimonious split that was never reconciled, he turned around impoverished Hartlepool and earned the attention of Derby. In six eventful years at the Baseball Ground, he turned them from Second Division makeweights to Champions of England. But, embroiled in a foolish game of bluff with his chairman and nemesis Sam Longson, he walked out.

An improbable spell at Third Division Brighton, and a much-chronicled 44-day stop at Leeds followed, before he arrived at Nottingham Forest in 1975. For the second time, he took a provincial East Midlands club from Division Two to the title, building a supreme team out of non-league nobodies like Garry Birtles, washed-up journeymen like Kenny Burns, and English football's first million-pound man in Trevor Francis.

The next chapter of the fairytale saw Forest lift the European Cup in 1979, and they did it again in 1980. The 1980s and early 1990s weren't quite as kind to Clough as the 1970s, but he still won a couple of League Cups, took a rebuilt Forest to the last four of the UEFA Cup, and schooled a new generation of footballers in the right way to play football, from Teddy Sheringham and Roy Keane to his own son Nigel.

He stood down in 1993, after Forest had been relegated from the Premier League, but by then, he had nothing left to prove, even though he never got the England job he craved and so richly deserved. But in September 2004, the ravages of stomach cancer meant English football had lost its most idiosyncratic voice.