All the best, most thought provoking reviews should start with a bold claim…this is no different. The Damned Utd is the best Football novel ever written…there, I’ve said it. Mind you, there’s not much in the way of competition.
Football, the national game, widely believed to reflect all of human life in its 90 minutes has been a difficult subject matter for the novelist. As a youth I, along with many others, marvelled at the exploits of Roy Race, Billy Dane and Hotshot Hamish, the thinking boy’s Colin Hendry! More advanced readers will have quickly progressed to the many TV tie-in’s such as Murphy’s Mob or Jossy’s Giants or perhaps Brian Glanville’s seminal ‘Goalkeeper’s Are Different’.
The quality of factual football books has never been as high as it is today, yet still fans of football and fiction are left frustrated. In recent years the reprint of J L Carr’s ‘How Steeple Sinderby Won the F A Cup’ was the only half-decent football fiction out there, but it bears little relation to football today.
Generally your choice has been limited to two different kinds of novel. Firstly, the dreadful, written in 5 minutes (supposedly) by a fading star of the past, a novel by Jimmy Greaves comes to mind, but I can’t remember the title…mind you, I bet he can’t either!
An exception to this most risible genre is Terry Venables’ ‘They used to Play on Grass’, written with Gordon Williams, the same bloke he wrote the ‘Hazell’ TV series with. This told of football in a not too distant future where plastic pitches are the norm, a dream that Venables lived in his glorious years with Queens Park Rangers (the glory – or relative glory – of course had nothing to do with the plastic providing an advantage… - Ed).
Otherwise football is used as a backdrop to the main plot. This tends to happen a lot in crime fiction where the Machiavellian nature of the world’s greatest game gives plenty of scope for the plot devices necessary for a satisfying thriller. Michael Dibden’s ‘Back to Bologna’ and Manuel Vasquez Montalban’s ‘Off-Side’ are good examples as their respective care-worn detective heroes wrestle with the world of football as well as the criminal fraternity. Frankly nearly every detective series has at least one book where a footballing superstar or failing local club comes under scrutiny.
Where these books fall down is when the game is actually described - as soon as the author utters the words, “Barnton Utd’s crunch game against local rivals Fotheringham Town”, any semblance of narrative drive goes out of the window. The reader is distracted and the suspension on disbelief is broken.
As Peace make clear with the vast reading list at the back of the novel, from 1974 programmes to trawling through excerpts from Yorkshire TV’s local news, ,there is nothing in ‘The Damned Utd’ that didn’t happen or couldn’t have happened. It’s rooted in history and fact.
Those familiar with Peace’s previous novels, the intense, gruelling and compelling Red Riding Quartet, ‘1974’, ‘1977’, ‘1980’, ‘1983’, and his complex, politically charged take on the Miners strike ‘GB84’, may or may not be delighted to hear that ‘The Damned Utd’ is the author’s least complicated narrative (his novels are multi-voiced, ‘GB84’ has as many as six narratives at play, but don’t be put off, for Peace, rhythm is everything and once ‘in’ you find it difficult to put down).
The author reads his work in progress over and over again until the words sound right, a repetitive process that rewards the reader with a lyrical, almost poetic feel even when describing the most dour or gruesome of scenes. Don’t be put off by the literary approach, Clough wouldn’t have, he was a fan of Alan Sillitoe and often quoted from ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning’.
‘The Damned Utd’ has two narratives that run though the 44 chapters. Both are voiced by a character no novelist would ever dare create, Brian Howard Clough, both concern key periods in the life of Brian that point the way to his eventual crowning glory.
The story starts in a sleet driven Roker Park, a broken Clough, left in a heap, knowing it was all over, knowing what he would miss. From that point on, via a brief sojourn to Hartlepool, the story alternates between Clough’s time at Derby and those fateful 44 days at Leeds…dirty Leeds!
Peace’s painstaking research reveals Clough as a foul mouthed, utterly driven and focused man, capable of astonishing generosity and warmth and pitiless malice and greed. A man haunted by failure yet often welcoming of destructive influence.
His time at Derby is a tale of the sweet taste of success soured by his inability to enjoy it for what it was. Clough considered himself the best and wouldn’t rest until everybody else thought the same way.
He was obviously a big family man; he would often have one or more of his kids with him. He loved his Mam and looking after his own was a big part of what made him the man he was. This extended to his players too…as long as they were ‘his’ players. The loyalty he inspired saw many of them follow him round the country, yet his efforts to get key figures in the Leeds dressing room on his side proved fruitless.
The 44 days are at the book’s heart, though how and why Clough ended up there will probably remain a mystery. Clough considered that Leeds team as an example of everything he was against in football. Revie, a fellow Teesider, was considered his sworn enemy and in Clough’s mind at least, to take his team, dismantle it and achieve it all again by playing proper football was a true and just cause. In truth Clough was by this time managing Brighton, an ill-judged move after he’d failed to engineer a coup at Derby. His loyal lieutenant Taylor had not followed him and he was looking for a way out. Whether he wanted to or not, Leeds was a job he couldn’t refuse.
Why did Leeds choose Clough? In those days clubs were still the private fiefdoms of local industrialists and made-good men, and Peace shows Clough as a pawn in a boardroom struggle. So the dice were loaded against ol’ big ‘ead before he’d even started; yet he poured oil on the fire every chance he got.
It’s hard to be objective about a figure we all know so well. It would be fascinating to get an opinion from a reader who has never heard or seen Clough. But it gives you lots to think about. I came into this book thinking the man was little more than a clown who outstayed his welcome (steady on! – Ed) and I’m glad to say I see more dimensions to the man now.
Would he have had the huge success he was later to achieve without the 44 days at Leeds? After reading this book I’m inclined to say that this was the fire that forged the man. He was given a mission by his career being cut short, but the real fuel was his need to prove that his way was right and the likes of Leeds was wrong.
What if Leeds under Jimmy Armfield, Clough’s successor, got to the European cup final, only to be robbed (and to riot). There followed largely undistinguished decades, peppered by the occasional dramatic success, but nothing to match the glory of Forest in the early eighties…had they given Clough his head…could it have been different?
‘The Damned Utd’ is a great read, evocative, funny, heartbreaking and it all happened…well most of it anyway. For Nottingham folk and Forest fans in particular, the Green Jersey is an almost ‘holy’ relic, a symbol of the man. Peace tells a story about Clough finding out that Revie, a notoriously superstitious man, had sacked a cleaner for wearing a green tabard on a match day. Clough immediately dug out an old green goalkeeper’s jersey and from that point on wore the green jersey at training and matches. The Revie part is true, but Peace made the Clough bit up. I don’t care; it summed up the man and his motivation…I’m passing it on as gospel.
Notes on the books mentioned
David Peace’s novels are all in print and available from any bookshop that has a clue.
‘They Used to Play on Grass’ by Terry Venables and Gordon Williams is long out of print as are the Hazell books. Amazon’s marketplace ought to be a good place to start your search.
The TV tie ins to ‘Murphy’s Mob’ and ‘Jossy’s Giants’ may be figments of my imagination, but ‘Goalkeepers Are Different’, by the doyen of football writers Brian Glanville, definitely existed and still exists, currently published by Virgin books.
The crime novels of Michael Dibden and Manuel Vasquez Montalban are again staples of any decent crime section in your local bookshop.
I can find no trace of the Jimmy Greaves football novel!
Alan Sillitoe, the Nottingham Shakespeare, is still widely read and widely available.
If you like ‘The Damned Utd’ and want more, go ask for ‘This Sporting Life’ by David Storey… you’ll not be disappointed.
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