The Damned United

Overachieving and eccentric football manager Brian Clough was on his way to take over at the country's most successful, and most reviled football club: Leeds United, home to a generation of fiercely competitive but ageing players. The battle he'd face there would make or break the club - or him. David Peace's extraordinarily inventive novel tells the story of a world characterised by fear of failure and hunger for success set in the bleak heart of the 1970s.

This is the true story of how a remarkable man called Brian fell out with a lot of Yorkshiremen, a few Scotsmen, the odd Welshman and an Irishman. Brian is Brian Howard Clough - 'boss' to you - the narrator of David Peace's fierce, relentless novel The Damned United, and, for 44 tumultuous days in 1974, the manager of Leeds United football club.

At the time, Clough was one of the most successful young managers in England. His own playing career had been cut short by injury in 1964, but to keep him 'out of the pubs and the clubs, out of bed and off the settee' he started coaching, first the Sunderland youth team, then Hartlepool United. In 1967 he became assistant manager of moribund Derby County, administering an almighty kick up the backside that propelled them out of the old Second Division  to the First Division championship and a European Cup semi-final.

It was natural, therefore, that Leeds United, First Division champions in 1974, should look to Clough as a replacement for the talismanic legend Don Revie who had been appointed the new England manager.

But everybody knew that Clough didn't like Leeds. While managing Derby he had become a household name as one of the first television football pundits and 'Old Big 'Ead' had made it clear that he thought the Leeds players ("bastards, bastards, bastards") were bully boys, a dirty team that had fouled its way to the top, and he despised their spiteful needling ways. But instead of saying no, Clough saw himself as a their messiah, a man who could turn them into a team that won, and won fairly.

It was not to be. The back-room staff made it clear how things stood. Bumping into Syd Owen, veteran chief coach, on Clough's first day "I put out my hand. I give him a wink. 'Morning, Syd'. 'Good afternoon, Mr Clough,' he replies, without shaking my hand'". The grainy black and white photo on the cover of the book tells it all. Clough leads out the "the glummest faces ever seen at Wembley" to meet Liverpool in the FA Charity Shield, the start of a new season. Behind him Billy Bremner, the tough Scottish captain, an Elland Road hero to this day, looks away in tight-lipped disgust.

There was little charity on offer that day. Leeds were ruffians in white. The 'Don' had mouled them in the image of Real Madrid, but they played like the Bash Street Kids - 'Bremner and the Irishman kicking Liverpool up the arse'. A few minutes into the second half, both captains, Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner ('these two clowns'), were sent off for fighting, a symbol of Clough's chaotic tenure.

Each diary entry is a wild mix of arrogance, paranoia, alienation and deviousness; Peace's characterisation is superb - Clough's complexity thrills the reader. Long lonely days and sleepless nights are fuelled by huge quantities of booze and fags, the voice stoccato and relentless. For a brutal, bullying, angry, manipulative character he is deeply moral. His public persona was brash and outspoken, but the Clough found here is a lonely, tortured man, missing his wife, his boys and his dead mother. Clough's treacherous treatment of his Sancho Panza, the surprisingly lachrymose Peter Taylor, shocks, but ultimately the reader is won over, despite the fatal flaw, the hubris that drove him to take the job in the first place and his incomprension, his denial, as he stares failure in the face.

This is a brilliant portrait of a highly complex man; a feat of literary ventriloquism, and a powerful portrait of another era, when players warmed up with a couple of pints, a game of cards and a packet of fags, before hoofing the ball about for 90 angry minutes in front of the terraces. Winners in those days got two points - not three like now - but losers got a right bloody bollocking from the gaffer.