"Well done, young man."
First things first: The Damned Utd is the best novel about football I have read, and marks a triumph for David Peace, one of our best writers. But this is not a joyful rumination on the beautiful game, or a relaxing reminiscence of the alleged "golden age" of football in the 1970s. This novel assaults its subject, Brian Clough's wretched 44 days as Leeds United's manager, in the manner of a Norman Hunter tackle - hard, ugly, relentless and laced with a strain of implacable malice.
Those who have read - or rather endured - Peace's horrific Red Riding Quartet, or even his awesome, awardwinning GB84, will know the malignant poetry this writer can wring from real-life inspiration. Peace can conjure an unsettling occult darkness from within the tightest boundaries of his exquisitely researched and grit-hard realism. His narratives are suffused in a frantic sense of dread. Peace's style in those works bordered on the rabid, and it does not change here. Clough's story is told in cold, short, hard, often manically repetitious, sentences. He circles around the same images over and over, slipping queasily between alternate narratives. Peace focuses on the misery of mankind and its faults and delusions like a demented prophet. The game of football is not spared: it is shown to be vicious, corrupt and brutal, shorn of any glamour and beauty.
It is hard to remember now, especially for those who recall him as a red-nosed loudmouth in his declining years, but Brian Clough was one of the biggest figures not only in football, but in Britain in the 1970s. He was a fine striker, a Brylcreemed killer in the box, notching 251 goals in 273 games, before injury ended his playing career at the age of 29.
His subsequent managerial career was a revenge on a world which had ignored his talent (he only had two international caps) and his ego (monstrous). Being northern, articulate and talented, he thought the world was against him - he was probably right. As a manager he was a mix of bully and genius. In Clough's golden period with Nottingham Forest, he won the league, and most amazingly, the European Cup twice.
The Damned Utd is set before Clough's ascent to glory, however, and takes place instead during his darkest managerial days, in 1974. Seen through his eyes and with an impeccable sense of time and place, it charts, day by grim day, his attempt to rip Leeds from the shadow of its previous manager, Don Revie.
Clough, who had led Derby to the league championship, was not the ideal candidate for the job: he openly despised Leeds, their players, and the way they played. He thought players such as Hunter, Bremner, Giles and Lorimer were cheats and immoral, and that Revie, with whom they had won numerous trophies, had indoctrinated them with cynicism, superstition, and foul play.
Clough's time at Leeds, which Peace details unsparingly, was doomed. He begins his tenure by telling the players to throw all their medals in the bin, because they had won them unfairly. Clough rarely speaks to the players or attends training, and his vital assistant, Peter Taylor, refuses to join him in Yorkshire. Before long Clough is saying too much, drinking too much, and suffering bursts of rage and paranoia. And Revie, cast here as a sinister warlock, haunts and gloats as Clough's world disintegrates.
Clough's story is a grinding lesson in failing against all the odds. But unlike his previous work, the writer allows warmth and humour into his tale. The death of Clough's mother is moving and delicately written, as is his curious, ambiguous relationship with Taylor, without whom Clough's fragile mix of ego and ability declined to function.
History, of course, proved Clough right: Leeds Utd was a cynical team on its last legs, and he was a truly great, inspirational manager. Peace's remarkable novel is similarly accomplished.
*The Damned Utd, Faber and Faber, GBP12.99. David Peace is at EIBF on August 18.
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