Damn fine job getting into mind of Ol’ big ‘ed

IF you’ve just unearthed that Christmas book token from down the back of the sofa, here’s a sure-fire way to turn it into literary gold: pop around to your local bookstore and exchange it for a copy of “The Damned United” (Faber).

Then brace yourself and settle in for a few nights of agony and agony and (just a little bit of) ecstasy, as you journey deep into the psyche of the one and only Brian Howard Clough. Yes, it’s a football book, Jim, but not as we know it. And it’s absolutely astounding.

David Peace’s novel, published late last year, has grown into a word of mouth cult hit. I had already been assured of its brilliance by more than one reader when an old buddy almost levitated with sheer passionate enthusiasm as he detailed the book’s merits. “It’s Shakespeare,” he declared. “It’s Hamlet, it’s Lear, it’s Macbeth...” Now, admittedly, he had a few jars on board and, admittedly, he tends to talk like this all the time about Shamrock Rovers but, by the same token, I couldn’t recall hearing anyone waxing quite so eloquent about, say, Ashley Cole’s autobiography.

And now that I’ve read The Damned United myself? I fear, if anything, my pal was erring on the side of understatement.

The structure of the book alternates between two related stories: on the one hand, the brutal end to Clough’s playing career and his subsequent rise through the management ranks at Huddersfield and Derby and, on the other, 44 days of hell at Elland Road in 1974, home of the hailed and hated championship-winning club who lend the book its title.

The latter period started as it finished. Here, for example, is the Clough guide to how to win friends and influence people, the new manager giving his pre-season pep talk to some of the best-known names in the whole world of football: “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 am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest f**king & dustbin you can find because you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.”

A health warning: if you like your football reading to stick to tedious fact and avoid all flights of the imagination, this is not the book for you.

Although the author has based his novel on sound research, it is still a novel, a work of fiction based on fact. Clough’s interior monologue, the tortured, insistent, compelling voice of the narrator, is obviously imagined, as is much of the behind-closed-doors dialogue.

And Peace doesn’t always get it right. For example, it’s simply inconceivable that Johnny Giles would have said the following to his manager: “I’ll be meeting up with the Eire squad on Sunday...” The author also admitted he got the genesis of Clough’s famous green top wrong. In the book, he has him wearing an old ‘keeper’s shirt for no good reason other than that Don Revie — whose Elland Road ghost dominates Clough’s waking and sleeping hours — was superstitious about the colour green. In reality, Clough only adopted the top at Nottingham Forest, donning Peter Shilton’s shirt one day, pointing to the number on the back and telling the ‘keeper: “There’s only one f**king number one around here, young man.”

But fiction is often stronger than truth, has a way of getting to the essence of a personality that no orthodox nuts and bolts biography could ever hope to do. Such is the case with the devastating portrait of Clough which emerges from these pages, a man by turns arrogant, rebellious, delirious, desperate, bitter, self-doubting, lonely, loving, funny, depressed, drunk. If the fact of the man didn’t exist, fiction would have to have invented him. Here, we get the best — and the worst — of both worlds.

And, in case you think this is all sepia-tinted nostalgia, a world away from the realities of the Premiership in the glamorous noughties, here too you will find rants about money, excess, diving, disciplinary problems, managerial mind games and all the other familiar aspects of life in the football fast lane. The players may not smoke so many ciggies nowadays — how did they ever get through 90 minutes, you wonder — but this is still the same game, beautiful and ugly.

But, most of all, what you get from The Damned United is Brian Clough: fanatic, family man, football genius.

I think the boy Shakey would have approved.