- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; 1st edition (17 Aug 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571224261
- ISBN-13: 978-0571224265
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.6 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (110 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 296,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Damned Utd
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More About the Author
Product Description
Eoin McNamee, author of Resurrection Man and The Ultras
Peace`s trademark incantatory prose still zones the moral and physical textures of the 1970`s. ... Brilliant.
Gordon Kerr, THE Book Magazine
An extraordinary piece of work, compelling, and, in some ways, shocking. ... A great read at any time of year.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't let literary style put you off,
By
This review is from: The Damned Utd (Paperback)
At first glance Peace's choice of the
world of 1970's football to set a novel in seems strange. In fact the story of Brian Clough's 44 days at Leeds United has everything required for a good story- corporate intrigue, bitterness between work colleagues and an alcoholic anti-hero with a rags to riches backstory. The narrative has two alternating strands - Clough's description of his 44 days at Leeds and the story of his time in football management from his the premature end of his playing career to taking the Leeds manager's job. At first I didn't find this appealing but as the book progresses this style makes it clear that his seemingly bizarre actions as Leeds manager had their roots in the attitudes he had developed and events that had happened in his life and career to that point, such as his dismissal as manager of Derby. It was the same attitudes that made his premature departure from Leeds inevitable. The constant repetition of certain phrases of Clough's internal monologue along with his bizarre behaviour (e.g. burning the desk in his predecessors office) hint at a man close to the edge of sanity and knee deep in paranoia. The shadow of the hated previous Leeds manager (Don Revie) fills Clough's thoughts as he aims to completely change the style of play that had made Leeds so successful and so unpopular. The senior Leeds players engineer his dismissal for this very reason. Clough was unwilling to give Revie or the players any credit, convinced that any success had been achieved through cheating and foul play. He appears only occasionally at training, then usually to abuse the players. At the same time he tries half heartedly to be friends with senior players such as Billy Bremner. From the start they make it clear they have no respect for him either. Leeds and Clough was clearly a marriage made in hell. Clough's greatest success was taking Derby to the title from the second division, with considerable help from the player scouting talents of assistant manger Peter Taylor. Without Taylor at Leeds and with a ready made team of stars he seems unable to cope. Back with Taylor again at Nottingham Forest he again built a team from scratch and took it to League and European glory. On this basis you wonder if he would have been as good an England manager as it is assumed he would have been. A knowledge of 70's English football is a help but definitely not essential to enjoy this book. For a reader more used to reading humdrum football autobiographies the writing style will probably seem a little wordy but as the book goes on the fascinating story will help you to forget this.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yorkshire pathos at it's best,
By Rob Smedley "Northern Bookworm" (The Boro, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Damned Utd (Paperback)
If you devoured the Red Riding Quartet as I did then The Damned Utd is a literary must. Written in the same well timed prose as his earlier offerings Peace manages to run at a relentless pace that leaves you both transfixed and wanting ever more.
As a Yorkshire man myself I have a certain apathy with all of Peace's work and find fascinating the way he manages to darkly evoke the memories of my 1970's Britain childhood. Don't let this put you off however as this is a book for everyone, as were his earlier works. Set around the fateful 44 days that Brian Clough spent at the helm of Leeds United football club whilst also chronicling his earlier career both on and off the bench, Peace brings to life a dark, dark world where his anti heroes exist. Don't be frightened by the fact that the characters become bigger than the book. This is something that Peace does very well so let yourself be carried along by it. His writing, above all else, is intelligent and the prose enigmatic. Someone once wrote that David Peace was the Yorkshire James Ellroy. He may be even better than that.
59 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Exhilarating, one of the most spectacular books you will read this year,
By
This review is from: The Damned Utd (Paperback)
"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'm concerned, the first thing you can do for me is chuck all your meddles and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest f***ing dustbin you can find, because you've never won any of them fairly. You've done it all by bl**ding cheating."
In 1974, Brian Clough, the man, the enigma, the genius, took over the helm as manager of Leeds United, a club he very publicly despised. He was to last only 44 days. 44 days during which he barely spoke to the players, took an axe to his predecessor Don Revie's desk, saw his captain sent off for fighting with Kevin Keegan in the Charity Shield at Wembley, and won only one competitive game. This is the fictionalisation of those catastrophic days, interspersed with Cloughie's early days in management: from Hartlepools in the third division to Derby County, the First Division Championship and a European Cup Semi-Final. In these happier days there are startling achievements and the beginning of a legend: the national acclaim, the players at Derby willing to go on strike to have him re-instated as manager, the hard work and the spending. But in the backdrop Cloughie's demons lurk: the alcohol and the paranoia, the determination and the arrogance; the obsession and the tragedy. In focusing the story directly on Clough himself, David Peace is able to recreate the claustrophobic paranoia and desperation of the man himself; through detailed research he has created a novel which brings back to life a legend the like of whom will not be seen again. `The Damned UTD' is a superb evocation of football in the 1960's and 1970's, and a brilliant recreation of one of the most controversial managers of all time. When you finish reading this you will come away from it feeling closer to Clough than ever before. But you can never really know him, he is too complex and unfathomable for that. He does not come out of the book well, but then neither does anyone, this is a bleak portrayal of football in the 1970's, as hooliganism increases and the gentleman's code flies out the window. For someone like me who barely remembers football before the Premiership it was an absolute pleasure to travel back into a different age, to watch a man run a football club in a way that would be absolutely unimaginable today. But it was those idiosyncrasies which made Cloughie the manager he was, and at the end of the day you can only judge him by his record: 2 League Championships with sides he got promoted from the second tier, two European Championships, not to mention a few League Cups along the way. And he did it all in style. Like many thousands of people before me, I fell in love with Cloughie. Rarely, if ever, do sports books make waves in literary circles but `The Damned UTD' has received unanimous acclaim by critics and public alike. Rarely are fictionalised accounts of real events able to recreate the atmosphere and personalities of those involved, but this one does, and does it so well that you often feel you are reading Cloughie's own private diary. Rarely do books written in the second person narrative work but here it is an inspired decision which helps build the claustrophobic paranoia as Brian Clough begins to crack up. David Peace has written one of the best books of the year. And in doing so he has proved that fiction, well researched and well written, is more adroit at recreating the past than any biography or history book ever could. Read this book, you will not be disappointed.
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