Review

The Damned Utd

By David Peace

Published by Faber

Brian is Brian Howard Clough – ‘boss’ to you – the narrator of David Peace’s fierce, relentless novel, 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.

Reviewed by Huw Molseed, Booktrust website manager

Other football books

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Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football by David Winner

This is a fascinating book about both Dutch football and culture. Holland gave the world ‘total’ football in the early 1970s, a breathtaking paen to collective skill and responsibility, led by the mercurial genius and 40-a-day man Johan Cruyff. Winner interviews the great players from the 1970s, including members of the teams that lost both the 1974 and 1978 World Cup Finals, discovering the absence of a winning mentality and uncovering internal conflicts that have plagued successive national teams and prevented them from becoming a European Brazil. He explores Holland’s colonial past and multi-cultural society, the impact of the Second World War, the dark spectre of collaboration and the country’s ‘difficult’ relationship with Germany.

David Winner is also the author of Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football. The idea for the book emerged from Brilliant Orange, when Winner found himself wondering why English football was so decidedly unsexy. This is a thoughtful, if at times surreal, analysis of the history of the English game marked by passion, strength and heroic failure, and marred by xenophobia and distrust of the flair players that could have changed the history of the national team. Winner charts the loss of empire and the origins of the game as a way to stop schoolboys masturbating

Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life by Alex Bellos

Everybody’s favourite team since they won the World Cup in 1970, this book examines the way that football is so deeply embedded in Brazilian culture. The book tells the story of the teams, the fans and the remarkable players from bandy-legged Garrincha, committed smoker Socrates to Ronaldo’s world cup failure. Bellos covers the fascinating story of the design of the iconic national strip as well as the strange lives of exiled Brazilian players making their careers in the Faroe Islands.

Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: My 20 Years with Brian Clough by Duncan Hamilton

Hot on the heels of The Damned Utd comes this portrait of the Clough years that followed the Leeds nightmare. Duncan Hamilton, a journalist who knew Clough and covered his time with Nottingham Forest, lays bare the triumphs and failures that dogged Clough to the end.

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