Dammed United

EW · Dammed United

I dont think the film will be interesting to anyone but Leeds or Forest supporters,,do you?

Garp

Derby fans pehaps?

EW

Garp

NE1

opens 27/3/09 in UK

Not sure about it but will probably go Rolling Eyes

I couldn't get past day 3 in the book, it sits unfinished on the book shelf.

NE1

nicked from Sq ball:

Excellent article in yesterdays Isih Times by journalist and fanatical Leeds fan Tom Humphries

Damned lies

As a lifelong Leeds United fan, TOM HUMPHRIES has endured a lot: the sale of his team’s best players, the squandering of their finances and more. Now, he writes, a biopic of former manager Brian Clough adds insult to injury, blaming his disastrous 44-day stint at Leeds on the club and its legendary players Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles.

CREDENTIALS

I FELL IN love with Leeds United when I was six years old and knew no better. They have marked me. I can’t remember ever believing in God but, I believed for a long time that Leeds United’s failure to win the double of league championship and FA Cup was the work of the devil.

The first time I was allowed stay up past nine o’clock was for the FA Cup final replay of 1970. Leeds versus Chelsea. I did so much crying and whining that giving into me was the only option my parents had.

Leeds lost. I went to bed crying and whining too. That’s pretty much all I have done ever since as far as Leeds are concerned.

We lived in London in an area overrun by fans of the impossibly louche Chelsea FC. In a time before replica kits, I owned perhaps the only Leeds replica kit south of Yorkshire. A skintight white number with the beloved hanging sheep crest on the front. On to the back my mother stitched a big dark blue number eight to denote my particular devotion to the patron saint of skinny strikers, Allan “Sniffer” Clarke.

Opportunities to wear my Leeds United kit were few and far between. Transvestism would have been more readily understood by my peers. I was and remain steadfast in the love that dared not speak its name.

Then, as now, there were moments of quiet triumph. The nuns whose vocation it was to push back the iron curtain boundaries of our ignorance in the south London of the early 1970s were concerned in a Geldofian way with the problem of global economic injustice.

In 1970 an offer was put to us six and seven-year-olds that it was wisest not to refuse. For the sum of one old penny a week we could adopt our own “black baby”. The nuns, who were well connected in the christening and baptism rackets, had arranged that we sarf Londoners could choose the name of the baby we were “adopting.” And so it came to pass that in a village somewhere in “Africa” all the male children were christened Peter Osgood in honour of the tall, urbane Chelsea striker, all except one fortunate child who answered to the name Allan Sniffer Clarke (or, as I still like to think, Sniff to his mates).

My parents moved back to Dublin from England before little Sniffer was walking. It was either that or put me in a witness protection programme.

The torments haven’t ceased, but the success has. The European Cup final of 1975. Paris. Peter “Hotshot” Lorimer’s scandalously disallowed goal. The creative response of the Leeds folk in the congregation (ripping out the seating and hurling it towards the pitch) has been hailed as a landmark sin in modern soccer hooliganism. Several of the club’s financial dealings in the decades since have also been hailed as landmark moments in financial hooliganism.

The tortures served up by Leeds United are so exquisite they could have been dreamed up by the producers of a gameshow in consultation with Torquemada.

We have developed a habit of selling on players (Dennis Irwin, Rio Ferdinand and that Eric Cantona) who become folk heroes at Scumchester United.

We have become the illustration model for reckless spending beyond our means. However bad post-Celtic Tiger Ireland gets, at least we won’t end up being owned by Ken Bates (will we?).

Today I am an outsider in people’s conversations about the ritzy, glitzy excitement of life in the Premiership. If the Premiership is Manhattan, we Leeds fans live near a steaming dump on the far reaches of Staten Island. We are slumdog bankrupts who occasionally catch glimpses of the fabulous skyline with its blinking lights.

I am a GAA person to the core, but even within the GAA I am part of a sub group (mainly sad middle-aged men) who support Leeds United but who should really be in therapy. We know each others’ names and we send each other bitter, irony-laden texts. We promise that someday soon we will head off, marching all together to Elland Road for a weekend. We tell each other it will be soon and it won’t be to just any old game; it will be a glamour match. Against Doncaster maybe.

Anyway we are the faithful. We have followed one Moses in a sheepskin jacket after another away from the promised land. All we have are our memories. Sniffer and Hotshot and Norman Bite Yer Legs Hunter. Shakey Sprakey and Johnny Giles and our glorious leader Billy Bremner.

THE FATWA

Now this. The world dodged a bullet.

There is no mobile phone signal in the cinema complex in the basement of the Dundrum shopping centre. As such, word of my fatwa against the makers, producers and distributors of The Damned United had to wait till last week’s press screening had finished.

Foolishly perhaps I let my anger further subside over a Big Mac meal accompanied by a feisty little vanilla shake. Twisty Fries sootheth the fundamentalist soul.

No mobile phone signal. Just a small randomly-placed hole in the global communications matrix – that’s how the world was saved from the immense wrath prompted by The Damned United’s offensive and sacrilegious treatment of events at Leeds United Football Club in the late summer of 1974.

No signal. If newspapers carried good news any more the headline would read: “Molecules Left Unagitated By The Refusal Of A Butterfly To Beat Its Wings Above The Atlantic Fail To Cause A Hurricane In The Pacific”.

Be warned, though. As a faith-based community, we Leeds United disciples are devoted to serenity and to stoic suffering. We are famously slow to anger. There are limits however.

First a brief catch-up for those whose grasp of great historical events is sketchy. In 1974 Leeds United, the great and beloved family club, lost its beloved father figure, Mr Don Revie, one of the greatest and shrewdest football managers ever. The club’s board of directors was rendered senseless with grief . Mr Revie had not, after all, passed on to a better place. He had been called upon to manage England.

In their pain and confusion, the Leeds board turned for comfort to Mr Revie’s arch enemy, Mr Brian Clough. Brash, flash, mouthy-pouty, Bryll-creamed Mr Brian Clough. The ill-conceived marriage lasted just 44 days.

THE MOVIE

The Damned United concerns itself with a southern softie revisionist version of events. It contends that Mr Clough was a football visionary and a wit of somewhat Wildean proportions to boot. It is true that he often said things which were funny and that he often produced teams who were, well, scintillating. It is true also that in Yorkshire that made him untrustworthy.

It is not true that the Leeds United side who rejected him like an organ donated by a deceased member of another species were a collective of malign thugs. Nor is it true that their refusal to respond to Clough’s genius was down, in no small part, to the sulky posturings of their evil derelict of a captain Mr Billy Bremner and his Irish sidekick Mr Johnny Giles, the Dick Dastardly and Mutley of the football world.

The Damned United contends that Mr Clough was too good for them all. He was just wrong for them. Nothing else. His preening self-regard, his greed, his insecurity and his obsessive self-promotion. Wrong. His decision to go to Leeds without the services of his faithful batman, Peter Taylor? Wrong.

Thus the fatwa.

In the movie the grim feel of early-1970s football is reproduced with loving attention to detail. Those mires which passed as pitches, those whitewashed dressingrooms presided over by men in sheepskinned coats who had brandy on their breath as they entered smoky boardrooms to discuss how best to keep their tight fists in their deep pockets.

MR SHEEN

The verisimilitude betrays the movie’s core agenda. While David Peace’s book views events through Clough’s eyes, the film purports to lend the weight of objectivity to Clough’s version. And so Clough himself is played as an exercise in studied and reverential imitation by Michael Sheen.

Michael Sheen, is a talented Welsh actor whose recreations of Tony Blair and David Frost have both had the nimble weightlessness of a fussy retail shop manager about them. His Brian Clough, while lovingly imbued with all the bizarre vocal intonations of the original, suffers from this critical lightness of being. It is an absence of complication and depth which allows no pathos to attach itself to the figure of Clough.

And Clough was about almost nothing but pathos. Towards the end of the movie there is a scene where having being sacked by Leeds, he is invited by Austin Mitchell (later a Labour MP) to appear that very evening on ITV’s Calendar programme. Mitchell’s astonishing coup was completed by getting Don Revie into a chair beside Clough and leaving the two of them at it for half an hour. In the movie Clough’s leading-man cockiness is as unruffled as his hair. Listening to or watching the actual programme, however, he is nervy and rattled.

What makes Clough appear three-dimensional on the screen is the line-up of comic book grotesques who fill out all the other parts in the film. Don Revie comes off badly, being played like a smug, jowly sadsack by Colm Meaney.

Billy Bremner’s image has been profaned here. I am not saying that Billy Bremner was the Prophet Mohammed or that he is entitled to the same respect. (“Fiery”, and “hard tackling” are epithets which have occasionally been applied to the Prophet, but He isn’t venerated, let’s face it, for his qualities as a midfield general). Yet he deserves better than this. Billy Bremner wasn’t the ideal of athletic manhood, but he was a hard man and a fine footballer. As the anthemic poem, Glory, Glory Leeds United goes: “Little Billy Bremner is the captain of the crew/ For the sake of Leeds United he would break himself in two/ His hair is red and fuzzy and his body’s black and blue/ But Leeds go marching on.”

His hair was red and fuzzy. End of. Red and fuzzy. That’s all.

He was not a severely-decayed cross between Rab C Nesbitt and Robbie Coltrane. He wasn’t bloated and inarticulate and accustomed to the hygiene habits which come with long-term homelessness

GILESY

And Johnny Giles? If Johnny Giles isn’t the nicest man on earth, he is certainly in the top three. He is not the prophet. The closest he will ever get to divinity is touching the hem of Bill O’Herlihy’s garment, but that doesn’t make Johnny an especially gormless extra from Paths to Freedom.

In the movie the first glimpse we get of the Leeds United team is when Clough, newly arrived at Elland Road, glances upwards at the Leeds training ground and spots the Leeds team smoking and chatting with their backs to him.

They are swaddled (we all remember these garments and can only stress that those were different times) in vivid purple nylon tracksuits and initially the scene references Jeff Goldblum’s first glimpse of Jurassic Park if Jurassic Park were populated not by actual dinosaurs but by the immediate family of Barney, the dinosaur sensation.

The tone shifts however as we close in on the faces. Clough and Peter Taylor (played with customary shambling chinlessness by Timothy Spall) come to resemble John Boorman’s canoe filled with white urban professionals Ned Beatty and Jon Voight as they go paddling through the Appalachian backwoods in Deliverance.

We expect that Norman Hunter may just begin twanging out some bluegrass on the banjo and Taylor, the credulous softie, will begin picking chords, duelling with him on the tune thinking he is making a connection. But we will have our first dark foreboding that either Clough or Taylor will soon be made to squeal like a pig by these inbred savages.

There is a moment where the Johnny Giles character utters virtually his only lines in the film. Slowly, in the manner of a stroke victim, he enunciates his view that Clough will be accountable to the Leeds supporters who fill the terraces. It’s so painful that you wouldn’t be surprised if Clough responded with just one word, duh.

The film, like David Peace’s book, represents Giles as disgruntled to the point of bitter destructiveness because Clough had got the Leeds manager job ahead of him. In fact, he had been offered the job and withdrew his name when he learned that Bremner was upset about having been passed over.

THE MORAL

What happened at Leeds in 1974 had a deep human complexity to it which Peace’s book hinted at, but which the movie scarcely acknowledges.

The fatwa can wait. We Leeds fans haven’t the energy any more and anyway we are away to Hartlepool in a few weeks.

It’s only football and it’s forever ago but to be the butt of the joke in possibly the best and the most realistic football movie ever made? Sure that’s what makes us the damned. Nobody likes us and we still don’t care, do we Sniff? Sniff?

The Damned United is released next Friday

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times.

Still very undecided whether I want to see this film. Confused

raveydavey

Sounds shite. Although it will be your last (and possibly only) chance to see the BRS warehouses behind ER on the big screen, as they've now been demolished.

NE1

another nick from Sq ball from Thurs independent:

This was in today's Independent newspaper..havent read it yet but it is by James Lawton, a veteran sports journalist who worked for the Express in the 1960s and 1970s, so he could be part of the biased southern press that Revie hated

The Damned United, the movie dramatisation of Brian Clough's notorious 44-day tenure as manager of Leeds, is released this month. It's great entertainment – but the real story is even more thrilling, argues James Lawton

Wednesday, 11 March 2009
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Graham Wood/Getty

© In Pictures: Clough and United
To a younger generation, the mid-Seventies must seem like a bizarre age. There was the hugely popular television warbler Val Doonican parading each week in a new and gruesome piece of knitwear, and Edward Heath glowering at an upstart named Margaret Thatcher. There were power cuts and three-day working weeks. And in football, we had rioters pouring like lemmings through cities both at home and abroad, while the superstar players lived in what seem now to be inconceivably modest suburban semis, with equally inconceivably big hair and kipper ties.

It was a bizarre enough time for those who can remember that decade in all its glory, let alone those coming to this era afresh, as many now will. But judging by the level of anticipation sparked by the film of The Damned United, which is released at the end of this month, it's an era easily as compelling as it is curious. The movie of David Peace's controversial novel which, published in 2006, tells a partly factual, partly fictionalised account of Brian Clough's catastrophic 44 days in charge of Leeds United in 1974, allows that age to live once again. Those who go to watch the film will see the cars, the hair, the wallpaper and the clothes in a way that no novel can possibly deliver. They will see, too, another masterful performance by Michael Sheen who, after taking on the role of Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon, turns in an uncanny performance as Clough. And they will get to relive the tale of Clough's brief reign at Leeds, without doubt one of the most dramatic of sporting tales.

Yet the most fascinating facet of this film is that it provokes a whole series of intriguing questions. They spring from the line trodden between fact and fiction, a line that has prompted Nigel Clough, Brian's son, to publicly state that he won't be among the many thousands who will flock to see this sure-fire blockbuster.

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The bare bones of the story are surely familiar to anyone who will go along to see the film: Clough succeeds the legendary Don Revie as manager of Leeds, the most powerful club in British football; he tells the team to discard the many medals they have won, accusing them of gamesmanship and winning ugly; the team gets off to a disastrous string of results, leading ultimately to Clough leaving, just 44 days after he joined.

For all the uncanny parallels of their journeys from the poor streets of Middlesbrough, including the pride that came when they played for England, Brian Clough and Don Revie did indeed become locked in a rivalry marked by contempt and, in the end, something that could not be distinguished from outright hatred. Thanks to the film and book, the animus burns on.

These great football managers, who had nothing so much in common as the ferocity of their ambition, now have been exhumed. The Damned United will no doubt achieve a flood of rave reviews and box-office reward, but it will also delve into a drama which, in its current telling, is critically short of persuasive answers for those survivors who were most intimately involved.

Could John Giles (by far Leeds' most influential player despite the fact that Revie had given the captaincy to his fiery but much less secure Scottish team-mate Billy Bremner) have been so ambitious for the managerial succession that he was a conspirator-in-chief hell-bent on destroying the new manager?

Were the Leeds team, who had brilliantly annexed the first division title a few months earlier really no more than a gang of surly, nicotine-addicted, cheating recidivists who had been controlled not by a man of relentless achievement who had created the most powerful team in the land and had just been appointed manager of England but a master of nothing so much as the dirty trick?

This is the thunderous implication of the book and the film, and in this at least they are firmly in line with the prejudice of Clough when he drove into the Elland Road, Leeds' ground, with an aggression many ascribe to than pure fear.

Fear, partly, it is theorised, of a team he had reviled even as they moved to levels of performance that eventually outstripped their grim reputation for relentless gamesmanship and brutal tackling, and maybe most crucially, the fact that for the first time in his managerial life Clough was tackling a challenge without his former team-mate and mentor Peter Taylor.

Some time later Clough, still carrying the bruises from his humiliating dismissal from Leeds, told a reporter, "It's not true that Mafia headquarters are in Sicily. They are in Leeds and the top man is Johnny Giles."

More than 30 years later, at the publication of Peace's book, Giles successfully went to law with a battery of supporting witnesses, to impose what he considered a necessary separation of fact from fiction, debunking Clough's claim that Giles was the conspirator-in-chief who sided against the incoming manager.

***

Yet perhaps the most damning verdict on a hugely praised work and an undoubtedly entertaining film – superb performances also come from Jim Broadbent as Derby County's cigar-drooling chairman Sam Longson and Timothy Spall as Clough's much abused sidekick Taylor – is supplied by Joe Jordan, a young player at Leeds when Clough arrived and one who would go on to play for Scumchester United and Milan and appear and score in three World Cups for Scotland.

I called Jordan, now first-team coach at Tottenham, to ask him about the film. He said: "I read the book but I will not be seeing the movie. I read the book because I thought it was about a part of my life, but the more I read the less I believed it had any real connection with my past.

"There were just too many inaccuracies, too many people were saying things they didn't say, and doing things they didn't do, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time and of course you lose faith in what you are reading. There is no doubt that Brian Clough failed at Leeds – or that he had proved before and would again later that he was a brilliant football manager – but I never suspected that he was ever drunk in the presence of the players, and if you read the book you have to imagine that it would have been inevitable.

"I'm told that in the film there is a scene where Norman Hunter [the fabled destroyer of opponents] attempts to cut Clough in half with a tackle on the training field, and almost succeeds. It didn't happen. I'm also told there is a scene where Clough, putting out the players' kit in the dressing room, lays out ashtrays. That, no doubt, is a guaranteed laugh but the fact is that of all the players at Leeds, the only ones I recall having a cigarette after a training session or a match were Billy [Bremner] and Big Jack [Charlton] – and Jack had left when Clough arrived at Elland Road."

In boycotting the film, Jordan joins Clough's son, Nigel, who also played for England and is now doing the job that launched his father into the football stratosphere, managing Derby County. Clough Junior's reservations echo Jordan's. "If you base a film on a book filled with so much that isn't fact, then that film is not going to be so far removed."

The film, like the book, constantly cuts between Clough's successful reign, and then his fall from grace at Derby and his misbegotten Leeds mission, which came after a brief and troubled hiatus at Brighton and Hove Albion. But it is a lot of ground, a lot of football, and, those who know the story best, say, a lot of fiction to cover. The result is mesmerising and often extremely funny, but it doesn't help if you knew Revie – and know that there was a lot more to him than a desperate need to acquire an edge, and more, certainly, than the description handed to Taylor by the film script, that he was a "superstitious twat".

Revie was a more interesting character than the film portrays, larger in life than on screen. Indeed, he had his rabbit's foot foibles and special suits and was obsessive about the need to succeed , and there were also times when his players yawned when he extolled the virtues of the northern songstress Gracie Fields. But then the widely experienced Jordan is quick to insist: "In his planning, his knowledge of the game and the way he treated his players, he was the greatest football manager I ever knew."

Clough's own protégés, Martin O'Neill, the highly-rated manager of Celtic and now Aston Villa, and who has modelled his career on his former boss, routinely makes a similar claim.

Yet in Clough's meteoric rise there were also signs of a terrible vulnerability, and it was not hard to see it on a tube ride across London I took with him back then. Following his departure from Derby County in 1973, Clough had, for the first time in his career, separated himself from his assistant and ultimate confidante, Peter Taylor, who had elected to stay on the south coast, which Clough found impenetrably alien. Clough was retreating from Brighton, where he had wearied of the challenge of again fighting his way from the lower leagues, a task he thought he had put behind him after his and Taylor's eye-catching work at Hartlepool United. Clough was alone now – and plainly lonely.

He confessed to me that he might walk out of football. It was a possibility that emerged again after his failure at Leeds, and was banished finally only by Taylor's decision to join him at Nottingham Forest for the years which confirmed his status with the triumph of European Cup wins in 1979 and 1980.

The film's casting of Giles as an ageing player embittered by the appointment of Clough, and the fact that Revie's recommendation of him to the board had not been accepted, is apparently uninformed by the fact that, days before Clough arrived at the ground with his young sons Nigel and Simon, Giles had been offered the job, accepted it – and then turned it down when Bremner expressed his anger that he had been overlooked.

Peter Lorimer, the Scottish international and Leeds defender known as Thunderfoot for his formidable shot, recalls those days. "John probably made a mistake when, after telling Manny Cussins, the chairman, that he would take the job, he called the lads and told them what was happening," he tells me. "Billy was very upset, thought he should have been in the running and demanded an interview with Cussins.

"When John went into the ground the following day he was told by Cussins that while the offer was still on the table, the board had decided to delay an announcement until the smoke [metaphorically speaking] had cleared. John said that they could keep the job, he hadn't sought it and though he was at the time of his career when he had to start to think about the future, in the circumstances he would rather carry on as a player."

***

But that's not to say that the film paints an entirely false picture of Clough at Leeds. Johnny Giles still recalls vividly his disbelief, and that of his team-mates, when Clough advised them to throw all their medals into the nearest dustbin. "It didn't make sense. We were the champions and like all players in every situation we were committed to doing well. Clough had had his success and whatever he had said about us in the past, we imagined he would be as keen as us for the club to succeed."

Most famously, Clough told the brilliant but injury-troubled Eddie Gray that if he had been a horse, he would have been shot long ago. He told Norman Hunter that he was hated across the land but really he yearned to be loved. Hunter, a superb player whose ferocious tackling was also accompanied by such natural ability that he would have been an automatic choice for England but for the misfortune of being born at roughly the same time as World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore, muttered that he did not give a "fuck".

The story of Clough's verbal assault on his new players swept through the game and left no one more bemused than Ian St John, the celebrated star of Liverpool and Scotland who back then was making a strong impression as the young manager of Scottish club Motherwell. The first move of the Leeds directors after hearing that Revie had accepted the England job was to approach Jock Stein, the legendary manager of Celtic and the first British winner of the European Cup. Stein declined but strongly recommended the young St John, who had deeply impressed Stein with first impact in the managerial business. St John met Cussins at Scotch Corner on the A1 and felt the interview had gone well. Indeed, Cussins suggested that the job was probably his, but the club had one more candidate to interview. Stein called St John to say that he understood Cussins had been very impressed and that, "it seems to me the job is yours".

Of course, the last candidate was Clough. I asked St John how he felt about this twist of fate. "You could only say, 'Fair enough, Cloughie has a hell of a record for a young manager,'" he replied. "But then you heard the stuff coming out of Elland Road and you could hardly believe it. When I thought I'd got the job I could only think, 'Well what a basis for success – you're taking over the first division champions.' I'd fought some tough battles with Gilesey and Bremner on the field, but believe me they were guys I would always want on my side. No, for a young manager, getting the Leeds job was basically a dream assignment." It was St John's dream, Clough's nightmare, and Revie's hopelessly fractured legacy.

The Damned United, the film, moves at a blistering pace, borrows massively from the brilliance of Sheen, and then you come out into the street and think about all the shades of painful fate that lay behind its matter-of-fact conclusion provided by the lines playing across the closing shots: Revie failing with England, running away to the Middle East amid charges of financial impropriety, and then the supreme vindication of Clough, an unprecedented winner of back-to-back European Cups.

That, plainly, is too neat. Revie was indeed charged with bringing the game into disrepute for the way he ran away from the England job and suspended for 10 years by his former employers, the Football Association, but it was an open secret he was about to be sacked before he jumped and the ruling was revoked when he went to court. There was no doubt Revie played his tricks, and though charges that he attempted to bribe opposing teams were never proved, there is a telling example of the lengths to which he would go to gain an advantage. The referee for an FA Cup tie between powerful Leeds and lower-division Bristol City was surprised to see an envelope addressed to him on the table in his dressing room. When he opened it he didn't find banknotes but a sheaf of newspaper cuttings, all on the subject of a spate of misbehaviour by Bristol players in recent games.

Near the end of his life (he died of motor neurone disease at 61), Revie was visited by Giles. They had a long and poignant conversation in which the manager expressed his one great regret: "I should," he told Giles, "have believed more in the ability of you lads, I should have seen sooner that I needed only to let you play." In the end, he did – and the result was some of the greatest football ever seen on English fields. Leeds had days when they touched the football heavens.

If Clough had regrets they were, we know, largely submerged in the tides of alcohol that so sadly lapped over the last years of a life which had been so vital, but which so near its end was also touched by ignominy when he was named in an FA "transfer bungs" inquiry.

The closing scenes of The Damned United declare Clough the winner and Revie the loser, but what it could not do, those closest to both men will always swear, was to begin to assess the price of the war.

'The Damned United' is released on 27 March

'If we didn't want to stay on the training field, we had to let Clough win': By Peter Lorimer

Playing in midfield for Leeds United from 1963 until 1979, Lorimer was part of the squad Brian Clough inherited from Don Revie.

I know, like all of football, that Brian Clough was a brilliant football manager, but at Leeds United he was not brilliant – he was lost.

The whole period of 44 days didn't begin to make sense. We all knew that things had to change when Don Revie left, new players had to come in, old ones had to go. The process had started before Clough arrived. Then, when he joined Leeds, he gathered us together to tell us that we should throw all our medals in the rubbish bin, because we hadn't won them fairly. Imagine being told that a few months after winning the league title by a mile. Big Jack Charlton had left us by then, and I can't imagine how he would have reacted.

I should probably have been more aware of what to expect – a little while earlier, Clough had insulted me while speaking at a Yorkshire Television dinner for sportsman of the year, which I had won. I wasn't there when it happened, because I only went to the dinner to receive the trophy, and Revie's order was that I leave straight after the ceremony. But Clough's speech was apparently very embarrassing. Harold Wilson was in the audience, which was shocked almost from the moment Clough got to his feet.

The press were all over me the following morning, but I was just a bit bewildered. It was the same when he made his speech about Norman Hunter wanting everyone to like him, and Eddie Gray being shot if he'd been a horse (because he was injured so often), and how we had to throw away the medals.

It seemed that Clough had it in his head that John Giles was desperate for the job as manager of Leeds, and would do anything he could to bring him down. But Gilesey had already been offered the job and turned it down after Billy Bremner had got involved (Bremner was said to have objected after he was overlooked).

In the film, there's a big training-pitch incident between Norman and Cloughie, but that's just not true. In fact, the trainer, Jimmy Gordon, did most of the work, warming up and so on, and there wasn't much involvement from the manager. When Cloughie did participate, it was mostly in the five-a-sides, and we learnt very quickly that if we didn't want to stay on the training field for ever we had to let Clough's team win; so we'd play for a while, and then throw a couple of goals into our own net.

When the 44 days were over, and then later when you saw Clough succeed at Nottingham Forest, you could only could conclude that a big factor in him losing the plot at Elland Road was that he missed Peter Taylor so much. He faced a big job, and it seemed to get to him at the start; he had had good players at Derby County, but John and Billy would have been great players in any age.

At Leeds we didn't see anything of Clough the great manager, and that was the biggest mystery of all, after seeing what he had done at Derby and then his work at Forest.

Frankie Gray went on to play for Forest, and he explained that no one really knew why they played so hard for Clough, though perhaps one reason was that they never knew what to expect next. On one occasion, he gave the Forest lads three days off after a match and when they came into training they expected a very hard session. But Clough told them not to bother getting changed. They were all going for a walk beside the Trent. He had brought his dogs.

The class of '74: Where are they now?

Billy Bremner Went on to play for Hull City and Doncaster Rovers, where he became manager before becoming a columnist and speaker. He died in 1997.

David Harvey The goalie also had spells at Bradford and the Vancouver Whitecaps. He was last seen working on the Orkney Islands.

Paul Reaney A former mechanic turned England right back, Reaney went on to coach football to kids at a Norfolk holiday resort.

John Giles After playing for Philadelphia Fury and Shamrock Rovers, "Jonny Giles" is now a football pundit in his native Ireland.

Norman Hunter Part of the 1966 World Cup winning England squad, Hunter has gone on to join the after-dinner circuit and work for Yorkshire radio stations.

Trevor Cherry The defender and one-time England captain more recently ran a promotions company, a waste paper firm and a five-a-side football centre.

Joe Jordan Scottish striker who scored in three World Cups, Jordan made the switch to the touchline. He's now coach at Tottenham under Harry Redknapp.

Gordon McQueen McQueen played for St Mirren before Leeds and went on to coach. Last year he moved to Middlesbrough to be an assistant scout.

Paul Madeley The "player without portfolio", who occupied every position for Leeds except goalkeeper, is now retired and has Parkinson's disease.

Peter Lorimer The winger's career suffered post-Leeds with stints at Toronto, Vancouver and York. Lorimer is a publican in Leeds and a radio pundit.

Allan Clarke A striker who scored 10 goals for England, "Sniffer" Clarke quit football after a brief spell as a manager to become a salesman.

Terry Yorath The Welsh midfielder and father of TV presenter Gaby Logan went on to manage a string of clubs. He's now at Margate.

Eddie Gray Gray went on to manage Leeds in the early 1980s and again in a stormy 2003-2004 season. He's now a radio pundit.

John O'Hare One of only three players (with McKenzie and McGovern) to be signed by Clough at Leeds, O'Hare later coached, most recently at Aston Villa.

Duncan McKenzie The mercurial striker has forged a new career as a columnist and radio pundit.

John McGovern A Clough favourite, McGovern went on to coach children in Azerbaijan and the US.

raveydavey

David Peace was interviewed on the radio the other night.

Apparently he's an 'uddersfield supporter.

Enough said, really.

wewantourdarbyback

raveydavey

ArmleyWhite

raveydavey

NE1

telegraph gives it 3*

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cultur...980/The-Damned-United-review.html

NE1

from the BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/simonaustin/2009/03/clough_film.html