Alan Brown filled a gap of disappointment in his early life by becoming a policeman. It is intriguing to speculate on where he would now have been in the police hierarchy if the pull of football had not been so strong that it tugged him back into the game. He would surely have been one of the major scourges of the criminal classes, irresistible in his contempt for corruption. I cannot help thinking that football's gain was crime's as well. Brown was the man who restored public confidence and self respect at the Sunderland club in the late fifties after a spectacular scandal over illegal payments: "If you like, I cleaned it up," he says. His cold, sorry anger in the face of greed and irregularity in matters of money is one of the institutions of British football. The fact that it is common knowledge that parents and boys are sometimes persuaded towards a particular club by costly gifts do not sway his attitude in the least. He said to me: "On two occasions parents have said to me, when I came to the point of signing their lads, 'Well, what about a bit of so and so?' My reply was, 'Look, you can take your boy home if you like, but you won't get anything illegal here.' Then they said, 'Well, what about a suit of clothes for the lad?' I replied, 'If and when he goes abroad with us he'll get his blazer and flannels like everybody else.'"

When Sheffield Wednesday reached the Cup Final under his management in 1966 the players were much aggrieved when Brown absolutely squashed their lobbying for more tickets than the figure laid down by the F.A. as the players' allocation. "The fact is," he said, "that the clubs and the players don't get enough tickets. But the thing to do is to change the rules, not break them. I said I would rather leave my job than break the rule. It was not my business that other clubs would have given way. How does a man manage if he hasn't got courage and responsibility?"

Brown says with a smile that has something of the sense of personal hurt in it that the newspapers have tagged him forever as 'The Iron Man'. He said, "I think everywhere I've been I've been viewed at the start with distaste." His first post as a manager was at Burnley, where he had played centre-half a few years earlier: "The first greeting I got was to hear on the grapevine that four of the well-known players had said 'If yon so-and-so comes here, I'm in for a transfer.'" But Brown's avowed commitment to the moral values, such as truth and frankness, made absolute by his joining of Moral Rearmament when he was in Sunderland, leads him to acquit the Press of outright distortion of his character. "I think people miss a lot of warmth in a man when they don't really know him," he said. "But I'll concede that in the end, over the years, the right picture comes through." There are many honest men in football, but Brown is fiercely attached to protecting integrity in the game as its central factor. It is more important to him than brilliance; success without it to him is merely deceit. His first value to football, which may not be of total satisfaction to his directors or his team's supporters, is that he is one of the counter-balances to the utter ruthlessness elsewhere in the game. If every team was conducted as Brown conducts his there would be less drama, less thrill, less interest in football; if every team was run as some other managers run theirs, there would eventually be no sport in the business at all.

Brown does not produce dull sides. He built the Burnley one containing Adamson, Elder, McIlroy, Robson and Pointer which flowered under Harry Potts into that marvellous blend of 1959-1962. What he will never build is a team which believes nothing at all comes before winning. He sees football as a professional, without a doubt, but he looks to it for uplift before cash. "Look at the tactical side of it," he says. "Look at the joy of a group of men pitting their wits against another. Nothing is more calculated to make a man of you than to run the risk of professional football."

Brown was born in Consett, Co. Durham. His father was a painter and decorator, and the boy was at grammar school in the late twenties and early thirties. He was an outstanding athlete and he wanted to be a schoolteacher and a professional footballer. Hexham Grammar School played rugby, so he played standoff-half for the school on Saturday mornings and football for a youth side in the afternoons. Being one of four children during the Depression ruled out university. His cousin, then captain of Hudersfield Town, took him into professional football at 16.

Talking thirty-seven years later about his experience on Huddersfield's ground staff, Brown remembered a situation very different from that which nurtures young players nowadays. He found the most effective way of getting any attention from the training staff was to block up the fuel jet on the grass cutter. He shook his head: "I was indeed neglected." He had hoped to be able to continue studying while with Huddersfield, and in the disappointment of finding no interest in his education, he left football and spent two and a half years in the local police force.

The police taught him, although incidentally, how to dig ditches, and he likes to make the point that he is as skilled at the job as any Irish navvy: "I was digging for days on end," he said. "I was keeping observations in a disorderly house case." The lesson proved valuable to him when he joined Burnley years later as manager. He established the clubs spacious outdoor training centre on the outskirts of town, and he emphasises now that it was literally dug out of the ground, and not only by hired labour: "The players got down to it - famous ones like McIlroy and Adamson - and dug ditches with me. And remember this was the time when professional footballers were supposed to be the most grasping people in the world."

He had gone back to football because its compulsion was undeniable. He had to return to Huddersfield Town because the rules of the sport at the time did not allow him to change clubs. But after the War Huddersfield transferred him to Burnley, then in Division Two, and in the following season Burnley won promotion and were beaten 1-0 in the Cup Final. He played briefly for Notts County, then retired to go back to Burnley and open a restaurant.

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