Damned lies

As a lifelong Leeds United fan, TOM HUMPHRIEShas 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 Manchester 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 Unitedconcerns 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 Unitedcontends 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 Parkif Jurassic Parkwere 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 Unitedis released next Friday