The Damned Utd David Peace Quite, quite awesome fictional retelling of Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge of Leeds United. Peace writes the entire story as if coming from Clough’s own mouth or subconscious. In one half of the narrative it’s the ‘present day’ and Clough is trying, and failing, to get to grips with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,50,44,12,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-2","category-books","category-fiction","category-football","category-mainstream-fiction","category-rated"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span>Quite, quite awesome fictional retelling of Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge of Leeds United.
\nPeace writes the entire story as if coming from Clough’s own mouth or subconscious. In one half of the narrative it’s the ‘present day’ and Clough is trying, and failing, to get to grips with the Leeds United job and the other tells the back story of Clough’s managerial career at Hartlepool, Derby County and Brighton.
\nIt’s a fascinating insight into a brilliant and deeply flawed man. A man driven by all sorts of demons, including a desperate desire to prove himself and to best those he respected and those he hated. There was no-one he hated more than Don Revie and his Damned Utd of the title. A great football team that won by playing game in as cynical a fashion as possible. It was his burning desire to best Revie and doing so by turning his cynical machine into a pure football dream that got him to take the job in the first place. Only for him to ruin it by alienating the first team and the board as only he could.
\nIt is quite simply the best football book I’ve ever read. If you have any love for the game you owe it to yourself to read it.<\/p>\n