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.

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.

When I first read it I thought The Damned United utterly brilliant. The black heart of football, 70s England, Yorkshire and Leeds Utd in particular, presented through a dazzling first-person novelization of Brian Clough's extraordinary 44-day tenure of the Elland Road hotseat. Marvellous. Football seemed to have found its Heart of Darkness (though whether it was looking for one is another question I suppose). My one grievance was that the end didn't quite justify the bravura performance, rushing toward a climax which never quite arrived. But it seemed a fabulous journey all the same..

Now I'm not quite so sure.

Recently, David Peace has taken to describing 'The Damned United' as 'fiction', which seems more than somewhat disingenuous. If you want to write fiction, seems a bad idea to me to base it around real names and circumstances which create the very strong impression of fact, and expect people (especially friends and family) not to be offended and upset (justifiably for once). Can calling your work 'a fiction' be a defence for any kind of defamation? And defamatory it is in some ways.

I suppose the irony is that no-one who knew Clough would deny that it's a fiction. I gather they would emphatically go along with that. What they object to is it being presented as a version of the facts.

However... I can't get away from the fact that I really liked the book. Around the central Clough story it vividly and viscerally expressed some truths about the 1970s in general and football in that period in particular which chimed with my own recollections. But the more I hear David Peace talk about it, the uneasier I am with the way it presents Brian Clough.