Clough Be Damned

Amassing free publicity akin to U2 on the BBC, the new film about Brian Clough’s ill-fated spell in charge of Leeds United has spawned huge amounts of column inches.
Brian Clough remains one of football’s biggest draws, five years after he died.
Witness the publicity when his son Nigel took over at Derby County, the club his father turned from provincial club to England’s championship winners.
He is already two months into his reign at Pride Park and outwardly very unlike his father, yet still barely a match report goes by without mentioning Clough snr.
The Damned United has polarised public opinion. Written by David Peace and published in 2006, some view it is a literary masterpiece of early 70s social commentary, some suggesting it’s the greatest ever book about sport.
Others feel you cannot inject such a degree of fiction into what is essentially a work of non-fiction, while the Clough family abhorred it, saying it failed hands-down to reflect Brian Clough’s nature. Perhaps because Clough was cast as a man eaten by bitterness, perhaps because Martin Sheen, who plays him in the film, swears constantly, something the Cloughs said Brian never did.
The press has used the film’s release as an excuse to partake in one of its favourite pastimes – reliving Clough the man. Pages and pages have been given over to favourite anecdotes and tales.
Mine has always been what he said about handling players who disagreed with him: “I'd have him into my office; he'd have his say, I'd have mine, we'd talk about it for 20 minutes before deciding I was right.”
There are some great new ones. Peter Shilton has recalled how Clough made him practise for the 1980 European Cup final on a roundabout because it was the only piece of grass they could find neat their hotel.
Stuart Pearce, a Forest stalwart who played under Clough at the City Ground (but also wore the back and white of the Rams. Only once, but he wore it – and kissed the badge!), has another. “Brian Clough was funny about Liverpool. His opinion was that they were the sort of club who put things in your tea. He used to tell us ‘don’t drink the tea. The cheating bastards have probably put something in it.’ At Liverpool he wouldn’t drink anything that wasn’t sealed.”
The film, like the book (which incidentally covers much of his turbulent latter days at Derby), will be ignored by the Clough family but promises to be a big deal here in the Midlands when it comes out later this month.
No-one loves Clough like the Derby and Forest fans and if it is deemed Peace and Peter Morgan, the film’s producer, have got him wrong, they won’t hold back in saying so.
Morgan has produced the film after tackling character such as Idi Amin and Richard Nixon. It will be interesting to see whether with Brian Clough he has met his match.