There’s been quite a lot in the news recently about Brian Clough, what with the release of the film The Damned United and the ?rebuttal? documentary by the Clough family.

This is all well and good, Clough was a great football manager, who specialised in making silk purses out of footballing sow’s ears, except that some of them papers have been running pieces lauding his management style.

Now I was no fan of Derby County (a bit before my time) or Nottingham Forest, but I can remember the great double European Cup winning team of the early 80’s, and from what I can see, Clough’s management style depended on:

• being strong willed to the point of arrogance
• ignoring those who disagreed with him
• being really funny, if rather unpredictable

Now take those attributes that were so lauded in a manager and compare then to ?Fred the Shred?, the much reviled head of RBS.

Yup, they tick off nicely (apart from the being funny one of course). So I’d have thought that qualities that you’d like in your football managers aren’t really applicable to running a large scale financial institution, or indeed any reasonably sized business without falling into a whole heap of trouble.

Cloughie was generally acknowledged to be on the side of the angels when it came to football, I doubt the same could be said of Fred.