The Damned United (David Peace)
David Peace is the author of several Yorkshire-based novels, most notably the ‘Red Riding Quartet’, a sequence of novels about the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. He was chosen as one of the Granta ‘Best of Young British’ novelists in 2003.
The Damned United concerns Brian Clough‘s infamous 44 days in charge of Leeds United. As a kid I grew up hearing how great ‘Cloughie’, as he was universally known, was from my mother, inexplicably a Derby County and Nottingham Forest fan. What we’d today call a ‘glory chaser’. If a context in which the word ‘glory’ and those two clubs could now be used seems difficult to imagine, that’s more of a testimony to Cloughie’s genius than anything else. Both clubs were minnows before he became their manager, and both have returned to mediocrity since.
Derby County beat the Leeds of Don Revie, whose presence looms over this novel, to the league championship in the 1971-72 season and reached the semi-finals of the European Cup the next year. Something that Derby County fans, then resident at the Baseball Ground rather than the new base of Pride Park, can never expect to experience again without a seismic shift in the way that football works.
Clough was known as ‘Old Bighead’. And what a bighead he was! Quotes include: ‘I wouldn’t say I was the best manager, but I’m in the top 1′ and, on debating tactics: ‘ we sit down for ten minutes, have a chat, and agree that I was right in the first place’. Roy Keane, the recently appointed manager of Sunderland, who was signed by Clough at Forest, quoted his simple tactics: ‘pick up the ball, pass it to a red shirt and move’. It was good enough to win Forest the European Cup.
But despite his headstrong persona (which included him once punching a fan of my club, QPR), one always suspected that beneath everything was a deeply troubled man. His alcoholism cost him his job at Forest, and in later years, took its toll on him physically.
Peace’s novel seems to come as close as possible to getting inside Cloughie’s head. He intercuts scenes from his final match as a record-breaking striker for Sunderland and as a manager of Hartlepool (which Clough inexplicably refers to throughout as Hartlepools) with his brief tenure at Leeds.
The narrative treats the events at Elland Road (the Leeds ground then as now) as being in the present, while the time at Hartlepool and Derby are told as an interior monologue. Throughout the narrative, both before and during the Leeds episodes, Clough is obsessed with his nemesis Don Revie, his predecessor at Leeds. It is this obsession and the hatred of Leeds that it breeds that ultimately destroy Clough’s job at Leeds. His opening speech to the team is:
Gentlemen, I might as well tell you now, you lot may have won all the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, as far as I am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.
As that extract shows, the book is full of footballer’s language, and is all the more entertaining for it. It is the first time I’ve seen the world of football adequately described fictionally, either on the page or the screen. This is a million miles away from a Kevin Costner baseball movie.
Ultimately, The Damned United is a book for people who know about and love football. And it’s pretty entertaining if you dislike Leeds United as much as the average football fan in this country (Elland road regulars and my mates GT and Ayaz notwithstanding).
While it’s not a great novel in my view, it is surely a better portrait of Cloughie than any biography could be, and it’s certainly an entertaining read. More to the point, it’s better than several of the books on this year’s Booker shortlist (reviews of all of them forthcoming). If you love football (the real football they used to play, not today’s Harlem Globetrotter variety) and are in the least interested in Brian Clough, you should read it.
