The Damned United

I had a few reservations about this film. Firstly we have seen Michael Sheen play a number of real life people in the last couple of years. Would it be possible for Sheen to cast aside these previous roles and play another big well known (in the UK) character in Brian Clough. I also had the distinct feeling that this may be a made for TV film that was bumped up to a theatrical release based on Sheen's recent success. My final reservation was whether the football would look good as it is frequently very poor when played by actors.

I have got to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the film. The main focus of the film is the relationship between the young pretender in football management Clough and the master in Don Revie the Manager of Leeds United. The film focuses on Clough's short tenure as the manager of Leeds after replacing Revie in 1974. The lead performances by Sheen and Meaney are excellent and it is at least as enthralling as the Frost/Nixon interplay.

It is a perfect film for me as it covers a period when my football passion was at its peak as I was about 10 years old at the time. As for the reservations I had nothing to worry about with Sheen. He transforms into Clough and it is truly a remarkable portrayal. I still tend to think that the film wouldn't lose very much on the small screen. Finally the film cleverly uses real life footage and we see very little of the actors playing football. That's probably just as well as they seemed a little older than the real players were. I'll have to check their bios to confirm that, but Bremner and Clarke looked the wrong side of 40 to me.

I suspect that to get the most out of the film you'll probably need to like football, but if you do you're more or less guaranteed to enjoy it.

I went to see this film with a certain trepidation as I don't always understand the true workings of the so-called beautiful game. I'm often rather lost by the offside rule, not too sure what actually constitutes handball and can't quite understand why a good friend can kiss a poster of George Weah and refer to the Liberian as a God. However, I can recognise what a worldwide phenomenon football has become and the massive status that the late Brian Clough held within in the sport.

Clough was one heck of a character and very much of his time and this is where 'The Damned United' really succeeds. You feel like you are truly watching the 70s when men were men and modern players like constant diver Cristiano Ronaldo would have been laughed (or even kicked) off the pitch. Sheen gives an excellent performance and Clough is portrayed as a complex individual with the sort of charisma and wit, which may endear him to cinema-goers who have little knowledge of football or the man himself.

However, I saw this film with a friend who is a huge soccer fan and who confessed afterwards to having certain problems with the accuracy of the story. The film is after all based on a book by David Peace, which merges the facts with his own fiction to show what he thought might being going on behind the scenes during Clough's reign as manager of Derby County and his infamous 44 days in charge at Leeds United. Having recently watched some TV dramatisations of Peace's other novels involving the real life Yorkshire Ripper murders it is easy to see why some people find his particular way of merging fact with fiction lacking in credibility. I personally didn't have such a problem with this film as I felt it really got to grips with who Clough was as a football manager and his probable motives for how he went about the job at Leeds.

While the film's narrative sometimes veers confusingly back and forth between Clough's time at Derby and his short spell at Leeds, 'The Damned United' is a really enjoyable piece of entertainment full of great actors bringing to life intriguing characters. The ultimate strength of the film is that the story manages to become more about friendship (the relationship between Brian and Peter Taylor) and the destructiveness of vanity rather than how many football matches Clough won.

I enjoyed Damned United particularly Michael Sheen's performance as Brian Clough. The film is cleverly written and fun to watch. The film makes Clough seem a much more sympathetic character than he appeared at the time. Many people including myself felt that Clough was an arrogant twit with an amazing ability to lose friends and alienate people. Sheen makes him seem likable. Clough had his demons and was a complicated man. Clough's methods were unique. He was essentially a dictator, and not always a benevolent one, often punching or slapping his players. What can't be argued was that he was a great and very successful football manager.

Clough's record was remarkable. He won the English championship with different provincial teams, neither of which is currently in the Premier League. He won the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest. In 1973 his Derby team lost in the semi-finals to Juventus. Clough called the Italian team "cheating bastards." A later London Sunday Times investigation claimed that Clough was right and Derby's opponents had bribed the match officials. Nothing was ever done about this by FIFA or EUFA, some things never change.

As a Leeds United supporter, who lived through Clough's 44 days at the club, I don't feel the film portrayed the events fairly or accurately. I don't remember the Leeds team being particularly violent, the game was certainly more physical then and players received less protection from referees.

The film depicts Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter and Johnny Giles as boorish thugs. Bremner was a hard man but he was also a very skillful player. He was captain of Scotland in the 1974 World Cup and has been inducted into both the English and Scottish Halls of Fame. Giles was at the time also the manager of the Irish national team. Hunter played 28 times for England. Don Revie was a great man who took Leeds from the old Second Division to two First Division championships and two European trophies. The film doesn't really explain how he was able to win the loyalty of the Leeds players. In movies it's just easier to show everything in black and white terms.

One thing the film does get right is the lack of money in football back then. When Peter Taylor was at Brighton he offered my best friend a professional contract. My friend decided to go to university instead. With the DVD this is an additional feature in which three idiots masquerading as "experts" discuss football in the 1970s. One of them thought Norman Hunter was Scottish. Another couldn't believe that the Leeds players were educated enough to understand Revie's tactical reports. Anyone who has played the game at any level knows that football intelligence does not correlate with academic success. I've played football with very smart streetwise kids who left school at 16, on the field they were tactically astute. Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United, was a shipyard worker before he became a footballer.

Overall I enjoyed the movie. It was clever and well written and Michael Sheen is brilliant as Clough.

Brian Clough (1935-2004) has some claim to be regarded as the greatest ever club manager in English football. Others, such as Bob Paisley and Sir Alex Ferguson, may have won more in terms of trophies, but they did so after taking over clubs which were already wealthy, successful and established. Clough's unique achievement was to take over a struggling, unsuccessful Second Division club, Derby County, turn them into English champions, and then to repeat this feat with a second struggling, unsuccessful Second Division club, Nottingham Forest, who went on to become not only English champions but also European champions.

Clough's career in football management, however, was not an uninterrupted success story, and "The Damned United" tells the story of his greatest failure, his 44-day tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Over the past decade, under the management of Don Revie, Leeds had become one of the leading clubs in England, and in 1974 were reigning League champions. They were, however, also the most hated club in England, having become notorious not only for a cautious, defensive attitude to the game but also for gamesmanship and violent play.

Although Clough and Revie loathed one another, they had much in common. Both came from the same town, Middlesbrough, growing up only a few streets apart. Both had enjoyed successful playing careers, playing at centre-forward, both had been capped for England, and both had played for the same club, Sunderland. Revie had also taken over Leeds United as a struggling Second Division club and had turned them into champions. Yet they had very different attitudes to the game. In contrast to Revie's "win-at-all-costs" attitude, Clough was an idealist with a firm belief in fair play and open, attacking football; he frequently referred to "the beautiful game", long before this phrase had become the cliché it is today. When Revie was appointed as England manager, Clough therefore seemed a strange choice to replace him as Leeds manager, especially as he had been one fiercest critics both of the club and of Revie. (Many other managers, in fact, agreed with Clough's opinions in private, but few had dared to express them quite so publicly).

Clough's main weakness as a manager appears to have been his lack of tact and diplomacy. He was fond of speaking his mind, and despite winning the Championship with Derby had been ousted as manager of that club following clashes with the club chairman Sam Longson. According to this film, Clough's first act as Leeds manager was to tell his players to throw away all their medals and trophies, "because they won them by cheating". Given this attitude, it is hardly surprising that Clough was disliked by the Leeds players, most of whom had idolised Revie. They were determined not to take Clough's message of "good, clean attractive football" to heart; during his first match in charge of Leeds, the Charity Shield against Liverpool, the club captain, Billy Bremner, was red-carded for brawling on the pitch with an opponent. (He received an 11-game suspension and never played again under Clough's management). Discontent among the players was a major factor in persuading the club's directors to dismiss Clough after a run of poor results.

The film is not a comprehensive biopic of Clough; it concentrates on his brief spell at Leeds, with the story of his days at Derby being told in flashback. It does not deal with his early life or playing career at all, only briefly touches on his private life outside the game, and his successes with Nottingham Forest are only mentioned in passing in an epilogue at the end. It presents a fictionalised version of his life and occasionally takes liberties with the facts. (Contrary to the impression given here, Dave Mackay, a one-time Derby player who succeeded Clough as manager, was not on the club's playing staff at the time of his appointment).

The film's main virtues are an excellent script from Peter Morgan and some equally excellent acting. Michael Sheen seems to specialise in playing real people, and although he bears a certain physical resemblance to Clough he avoids the mistake he made when playing Tony Blair in "The Queen", that of trying to imitate his subject too exactly as though he were a Mike Yarwood-style impressionist rather than a dramatic actor. The other excellent contributions come from Colm Meaney as the self-righteous Revie, genuinely unable to understand why anyone might object to his team's playing style, from Jim Broadbent as Longson, a self-important small-town businessman who has attached himself to the town's football club despite an almost total ignorance of the game, and from Timothy Spall as Clough's assistant, Peter Taylor. Unlike Sheen and Meaney, Spall bears very little resemblance to the man he is playing, but as Taylor generally kept a much lower profile than Clough this does not really matter. Taylor, a more substantial figure than most assistant club managers, nevertheless played a key role at Derby, so he is an important character in this drama. He did not follow Clough to Leeds; had he done so, Clough's appointment might have been a greater success.

Despite its international popularity, football has inspired surprisingly few good films, and virtually no great ones. In the 2000s, however, the British cinema managed to produce two very good films about the sport, of which this is the second. (The first was "Bend It like Beckham"). The film's main appeal will, I suspect, be to sports fans and to those with an interest in football history, especially those who, like myself, are old enough to remember the events of the 1970s. Nevertheless, there is enough human drama in "The Damned United" to appeal to film-lovers who have only a passing interest in football. 8/10

Peter Morgan (Writer of The Queen and Frost/Nixon) reunites for the third time with Michael Sheen (Leading actor of The Queen and Frost/Nixon) as the two men look to complete a hat-trick. Michael Sheen can tick off another box on his list of his portrayals of iconic Englishmen as his witty performance is a key reason for what makes The Damned United a joy to watch. The performances stand out with many well done performances by the leading cast, in particular Sheen and Spall who show a very impressive on screen relationship.

The film can get confusing at times as it follows two different stories, switching frequently from Brian Clough's miraculous time at Derby County and his disappointing and shambolic time at Derby's then rivals Leeds United. The film doesn't get involved in Clough's personal life but focuses on his career with both clubs, starting off with Clough viewed firstly as a small-time 2nd Division manager to a arrogant manager on top of the Division 1, another key issue is his close friendship with his assistant Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) and hatred of the man who preceded him as Leeds boss, Don Revie (Colm Meaney). While at Leeds the key points of focus is Clough's determination to replace Don Revie as a hero in Leeds and 'father figure' as well his poor relationship with the players and the end to his arrogance. Many people may feel that The Damned United is just for football fans, and even though it may appeal more to football fans it's an entertaining film and a joy to watch.