The Damned Utd

By AM Sunday, November 17, 2013

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I picked up The Damned Utd one wet morning in Dublin. Too early to get into an oral history conference, the purpose of my visit to the city that day, I browsed through the used bookshops of Capel Street. As far as these places go it is a pretty congested street, much like one I had walked through in London this summer past. The shelves were well stocked but despite having visited it a few times since picking up The Damned Utd, disappointingly nothing else has caught my eye. 

The cover of this book is enough to catch the eye. The scowls of the Leeds United players as they walk behind Brian Clough in 1974 as he leads them out onto the Wembley turf suggests Elland Road was not a happy hunting ground: ‘the glummest faces ever seen at Wembley.’

Earlier a friend had given me as a present the Tokyo domiciled Brian Peace’s Red or Dead, which reconstructs the life of Bill Shankly, the once famed manager of Liverpool FC. Before I got to opening it I was advised to read The Damned Utd first. Apart from being highly recommended, I knew it was within reach, having seen it so often in used bookstores. It was only to be a matter of time before it would come again.

It is an absorbing read from the opening page.  I guess the reader would require some familiarity with English soccer in the 1970s and the mercurial personality of Brian Clough. I am not sure how it would read to someone coming at it in the the way they might arrive cold to a crime fiction novel. Prior knowledge of the soccer personalities involved is the bait, without which only a sprick size readership might be the sum of the catch. 

A few chapters in I decided I wanted to follow this one up with Clough The Autobiography that had been on my bookshelves for 15 years. I asked my 8 year old son, an avid sports reader, if he knew where it was. In the bookshelf in the hall, he told me. Well, that was daft, I mused, we don’t store sports books there.

I searched upstairs where I thought it would be for the guts of an hour. It was not an unproductive venture as I managed to put in some order the military history books that I have yet to get through. No joy with Clough and I began to doubt if I still had it. Back downstairs, a quick glance in the direction of the bookshelf in the hall and there it was. Should have listened to my son to begin with. Sometimes they are young enough to know just about everything. Anyway, the book was one I had bought in Liverpool while in the city for a game. It was not just as chance would have it that the guy who gave me the Shankly one was also with me the morning I bought Clough: it’s a shared soccer thing.

This story covering 44 strife filled days contrasts Clough's barren time at Elland Road with his successful spell at the Baseball Ground as Derby County boss. It is an intense body of work, never letting up in its day by day account.  Elland Road was a cauldron of hatred, staffed by players Clough regarded as filthy cheats. The players hated Clough and he felt the same about them, contemptuously regarding them as the team of Don Revie, whom he also hated.  He seemed not to do irony when he openly accused Revie of being a hater. His arrogance and self-belief fueled an incendiary atmosphere. His attitude that the players were ‘cunts, cunts, cunts’ was returned with interest added on. While his rows with the Derby County directors were both legendary and incendiary he never lost the backing of the players whom he had guided to the pinnacle of English league soccer.  A protest movement was formed after he lost this job.  At Leeds it seemed one could as readily have been organised to get rid of him.  

Clough’s tenure with the club at a mere month and a half is one of the shortest in the world of British soccer. When he was fired one of the major moments of English soccer history had arrived.
 

Given his predisposition toward hating Leeds it still seems strange why he opted to go there. All he achieved was to allow it to give him the boot after 44 days. Revie must have laughed although Clough went on to greater things, taking the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest, a trophy that never felt the clasp of Leeds hands. 

Feeling that he was loved for what he wasn’t and hated for what he was, Clough against the world – if we subtract Peter Taylor, his ‘only friend’ from it - was pretty much how life lined up in front of him. His personality is overbearing, a force of nature. An opinionated but immensely talented man who didn’t seem to battle as much with booze as love it, the biggest regret in his life seemed not to be failing to become the England manager but losing the Derby job.

In the final quarter the book started to sound repetitive: the complaints, hatreds and arguments were the same. Clough hated the players, their paperback books and their playing cards that invariably accompanied them onto the team coach going to and from matches. There was only ever going to be one outcome in this cold house -  a freezing out: Clough angrily looking in to the coach with the players staring balefully back.

There are few other sports novels that I can think of or would feel tempted to pick up. If the genre is established this type of work takes it to a new height. Clough’s family felt it depicted him too harshly, while central character Johnny Giles threatened legal action, claiming that there were incidents in the book that didn’t happen. Even though it was a novel Giles still felt it defamed him.

Clough seemed to think that many of the problems stemmed from Giles who felt that he was the heir apparent to Don Revie. But it wasn’t Giles alone. The team captain, Billy Bremner, was less than warm towards Clough as well. The only player sympathetic seemed to be Allan Clarke. The two met one day in circumstances similar to the Deep Throat meetings, Clarke in disguise. Such was the damned division within The Damned United. 

 Brian Peace, 2006, The Damned Utd. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-57122433-3