Leeds circus but a blip in Clough's story

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 21:00

Clough ITV1, Wednesday

MICHAEL Sheen's bravura performance as Brian Clough has been the main talking point about The Damned United, the film of David Peace's novel about the football manager's brief time at Leeds United. The actor has been praised for his realistic recreation of Clough, just as he was for his previous portrayals of characters such as Tony Blair, David Frost and Kenneth Williams.

But realism is not the same as reality, and Clough's family – specifically his widow, Barbara, and their son, Nigel – have a simple objection to the film and book alike. It just wasn't like that.

In this well-timed documentary, the Cloughs, assisted by friends like Geoffrey Boycott and improbable allies such as former Leeds player Johnny Giles, were given the chance to put their side of the story. But, as well as tackling the film's lack of veracity head-on, this programme was also a welcome reminder of Clough's whole remarkable story.

Because of course there was far more to it than the 44-day stay at Elland Road. What he achieved at Derby County, taking a team of toilers out of the old Second Division and on to the League Championship, would have been enough in itself for Clough to stake a claim as one of the most able managers in the history of the English game. What he did at Nottingham Forest, however, was even more incredible.

When Clough took over at Forest – in January 1975, after a few months spent recharging his batteries in the wake of the Leeds fiasco – they were, according to one account, "a rundown cornershop of a club struggling to stay in the Second Division". Which of course is where they are now, and where they might have stayed for the interim but for the manager and his assistant, Peter Taylor.

As one interviewee after another agreed, what the pair did there could not be emulated these days. They took a ragtag bunch of players to the league title, and then to two successive European Cups. They turned a provincial team into the kings of the continent.

This was the true testimony to Clough's greatness. The six-week circus at Leeds, for all its obvious fascination, was little more than a perplexing interlude between the two great acts of the manager's career. So, too, was the Football Association's decision not to appoint him as England manager.

If Clough had taken that latter post, and provided he had been allowed to take Taylor with him, there is no knowing what might have happened. It would surely have halted Forest's ascent to the summit of European football in its tracks, but it might also have prevented the decades of morale-sapping underachievement which followed for the English national team.

But Clough was less concerned with such speculation, and more interested in celebrating the man and what he accomplished. Former players of his at Forest such as Martin O'Neill and John McGovern testified to his powers of motivation, while Giles paid an especially gracious tribute.

The Irishman had been Don Revie's nominated successor at Leeds, and was understandably less than delighted by some of Clough's disparaging comments when he took over instead. But his disagreements with the manager remained honourable, and he objected to the novel The Damned United enough to take legal action – successfully – against it. "The portrayal of Brian Clough is absolutely outrageous," Giles said.

Barbara Clough had a wider-ranging criticism of the book and film, one which was not deflected by the film's makers claiming they had produced a more sympathetic portrait of the manager. "Have you read a novel with a real person's name in it?" she asked. "I keep asking people, and they say 'No I haven't really'."

To be fair to Peace and to those who adopted his book for the screen, there are of course thousands of novels with real people's names in it. Much of historical fiction, for a start – and some examples of that genre, such as the Claudius books by Robert Graves, have been applauded for their ability to bring their period alive.

The closer we come to the present day, however, the more problematic the genre becomes. Schindler's Ark, for example, is a wonderful novel, yet even while admiring it you can hardly ignore the fact that it is at times a very uneasy balance between what was a matter of record at Auschwitz and what was a product of Thomas Keneally's inventiveness.

And of course, for Barbara and Nigel Clough, The Damned United is closer to home as well as being very near to the present day.