Tcrh The Damned Utd

Better Than Football

Review

It is tempting to claim that this is the best football novel ever written.

But David Peace has created a novel that, like Clough himself, is bigger than the game. Ostensibly focussing on Clough's ill fated 44 day spell as manager of Leeds, football becomes a bit part player in the drama off the field and the drama of Clough's psyche.

Peace's Clough is the Clough we all know: loud, bombastic, drunk, cajoling, vindictive, funny, crazy. But this Clough is turned in on himself. The nightmare at Leeds is played out in concert with flashbacks to the glory days at Derby: the best and worst of football. The best and worst of Brian Clough.

Clough is haunted by the knee injury that wrecked his playing career. He is driven by the fear of failure, of once again being flung to the scrapheap. He transfers this into a culture of fear to dominate his players. At Leeds this couldn't work.

The players felt he was an upstart. He felt they were "a gang of apes after a fuck." His problem was that they couldn't give a fuck.

Peace paints Clough as man constantly battling with his own soul whilst trying to change the soul of a reviled football club. Not even Clough could manage that.

David Peace has created an epic: triumph, tragedy, fear, joy, humour and black, black nights of the soul. A book about the genius and flaws of a great but fallible man.

An instant classic.

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