THE DAMNED UNITED

There isn’t a female character in The Damned United. Yes, there are sweepers in the changing rooms (the cleaning variety rather than the footballers) and wives calling their husbands back to the dinner table, but there isn’t a significant role for a woman in this movie. Yet it’s not quite a lad’s flick either. A buddy movie perhaps, but the setting didn’t have to be the grounds of a football club, and the movie is worth a gander for non football fans, be they menfolk or womenfolk.

Another effort from actor Michael Sheen and writer Peter Morgan, the movie flashes back and forth between 1974 and the decade before to show how football manager Brian Clough (Sheen - great) came to have such an intense loathing of fellow manager Don Revie (an on-form Colm Meaney).

Strangely, there are a couple of seminal phone conversations, much like the one in Frost/Nixon, another Sheen-starring, Morgan-penned film.

Early on, Clough is shown to have misread a perceived slight by Don Revie at their first encounter. So begins a bitter rivalry between the pair, with the brash Clough seeming to knock Revie in public at every opportunity. Revie is played proud by Meaney, standing tall and pillarlike against Clough, unwilling to acknowledge the dirty play of his Leeds team. A real Column Meanie. (I'm sorry, I just had to.)

Clough’s scouting partner Peter Taylor is played by an always reliable Timothy Spall. This relationship complements the hostile one between Clough and Revie and gives the film a warmth that it would otherwise lack. Hence the buddy vibe.

Things come to a head because of Clough’s hubris. He refuses to go south with Taylor and instead takes up the position of Leeds manager after Revie’s departure to coach England.

Other support comes from Peter McDonald as Johnny Giles, whom Clough refers to throughout as “Irish”. Stephen Graham plays Leeds captain Billy Bremner, who bears more than a passing resemblance, methinks, to Gary Cooke – who plays Gilesy in the Apres Match comedy team. So before you go to the movie, make sure you block out from your memory what Gary Cooke looks like, so you don’t get mixed up like I was.

Obviously, the movie simplifies events for the sake of plot and those in the know claim that it isn’t all that accurate. However, as someone who doesn’t know much about the beautiful game, often wondering why Rafa claims that he likes to start a return match with “a clean shit”, I found myself enjoying it immensely.

The great lines that Clough came out with during his career could have carried over more into the dialogue that Morgan wrote. The humour has already been written into the piece by Clough himself in period interviews. Crackers such as “I wouldn’t say I’m the best manager in the business…but I’m in the top one” permeated Clough’s public statements and they’re included here and delivered well by Sheen. Otherwise though, Clough is quite the misery-guts, given his bitterness and self-destructive pride.

Nevertheless, the film is a fine (if factually inaccurate) character study of a man who is regarded by many as the best manager to ever have graced the English leagues.

-Michael Heraclitus