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Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge! , Longford), Timothy Spall (Michael Sheen), and Colm Meaney (How Harry Became a Tree) are all great actors, and their presence means that this film is worth watching even if you don't particularly like football. I doubt however, you would be watch if you weren't a fan.

Brian Clough (Sheen) brings Derby out of obscurity to the top and ends up managing his archenemy Leeds United. He hates the team, he hates the style of football they play, and yet, he signs on to manage them. A recipe for disaster, and a disaster it was.

The film is not so much about football, as it is about Clough. He makes enemies everywhere he goes. No wonder he only lasted 44 days.

A fantastic film with brilliant performances by Sheen and Spall.

Having read the book, I did expect a darker film, however, it is not to the detriment of the film that it attempts to give the interpretation a 'feel good factor. Sheen is utterly brilliant as Clough and captures the ego, charisma and above all weakness of the man. The support cast are excellent, although Spall did struggle to look comfortable in a sporting film (Taylor was en ex goalie and poor Tim's got 10 to 2 feet etc). There are a lot of factual inaccuracies, but it is based on a 'faction novel' so one should not allow this to spoil a memorable film and if it does nothing else it does make you feel extremely nostalgic to this era.

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

I am currently two thirds of the way through the novel. I'm finding it to be a great discovery. Peace's writing has all the energy and pace of Irvine Welsh at his best and having just caught the Red Riding trilogy, he's captured my imagination. What he has truly captured in The Damn United is the true spirit of the 70's and the days when I would watch football dressed in the kit of whatever team I was supporting that week, on my Dad's knee. My Dad loathed Brian 'Bigmouth' / 'Bighead' Clough! But even as a boy I loved him, thought he was hilarious. Reading the novel and seeing the film, we discover a man truly out of time ... more a man / celebrity of the future. The first celebrity football manager? If he'd been a manager in the Britpop era, he'd be a national treasure now ... and may even have been given the England job he so coveted and that the fans longed for him to have. watching Sheen (yet again!) faithfully recreate voice, mannerisms ... inhabiting this character, makes this film (for it is a 'film' in the truly British sense) all the more compelling. Cloughie is complex, sensitive, probably with an inner shyness that he masked outrageously with his outspoken diatribes. He was everywhere when I was a kid ... TV, papers, magazines ... always with a controversial line that makes Noel Gallagher look like he minces his words. The on screen footie from actors is mercifully kept to a minimum, as - as always, actors don't make for convincing footballers. Even the moments from them we do get, they look clueless. But it doesn't detract from the story ... a story of obsessive desire, absolute drive and male relationships, in a time when male bonding usually meant trading a punch or two. This is a good if unfaithful adaptation of the novel. Why in the film do Cloughie and Peter Taylor fall out with a row on the Malaga harbour? In the novel, they trade punches and Cloughie makes a real show of himself ... thus making the reunion all the more difficult. But it's a small gripe. The thing I really took from this was although times have changed for football - when did Man Utd dressing room last have ashtrays??? - essentially, things have changed little. Big star players, vast amounts of money (£150,000 was considered a fortune back then), teams fortunes spinning on their positions in the old division one, the league being dominated by one or four big clubs. And the cheating, and the ref baiting ... little has truly changed.

Good to see a strong Brit-flick that doesn't resort to mockney gangster schlick or the current plethora of cheap horror schlock. This is a character study of depth and resonance. Beautifully, stylistically photographed and wonderfully performed. GO SEE IT!

Brian Howard Clough. "The greatest English manager never to manage the English National side." Whether you agree with that sentiment or not, everybody knows Brian Clough was one of the great personalities of the game. Based around David Pearce's bestselling novel 'The Damned United' (which Johnny Giles called: "fiction based on fact"), the films narrative follows the events preceding and during those fateful 44-days of management from the perspective of Cloughie (played by Michael Sheen).

Sheen turns in, yet another brilliant performance as the arrogant, stubborn, distant, bitter, intelligent, yet highly flawed man who went on to become a legend of British football. From his mannerisms to the way he speaks, Sheen projects the outward personality of Brian Clough through to the audience to a tee. And more importantly he takes the film away from the touchlines of simply being 'another football film', and instead creates a human drama about one man's battle with jealously, bitterness and ambition and how that can destroy everything around you, quicker than Billy Bremner could break your legs. While Morgan's script keeps up the dry wit and humour, and Hooper's direction carries the colourful scenery of 1960's and 1970's Britain, the film could have spent more time centred around the other players on the pitch, more specifically Clough's second in-command in Peter Taylor and the Leeds United side of the Revie era. They are shown to be Revie's surrogate sons and nothing more. With that said however, I found it a hugely enjoyable film that went way beyond the stereotypical association we have football films today and instead created a profile of a man who encompassed everything that was good, bad and all that in between about the beautiful game.