Another long one – and, again, it’s divided into sections if you can’t manage the whole lot in one go.
Bringing the Damned to life
I recently finished work on the forthcoming film The Damned United, which focuses on Brian Clough’s turbulent 44-day spell at Leeds United.
My role on the film was initially to cast the extras, then to be coach to the main cast pre-filming, and finally to choreograph the football scenes. The film has far fewer football scenes than the others on which I’ve worked, and it is firmly driven by the drama off the field.
The film is, of course, based on the brilliant novel by Yorkshireman David Peace.
David must be on the verge of becoming the very, very best British writer of our generation, and I actually think that if you look at his existing work – namely The Red Riding Quartet, GB84 and the more recent Tokyo Year Zero and The Damned United – he already is!
Like football, you need a good team to be successful and we had a fantastic group behind the film led by Andy Harries, the executive producer, and Peter Morgan, the screenwriter who already has, among others, The Queen, The Last King of Scotland and Frost/Nixon behind him. Peter has enjoyed terrific success, but was most down to earth, and he even joined in some of our preparatory training sessions in London and was not such a bad player!
Colm Meaney puts in an incredible performance as Don Revie, and I thought that Brian McCardie shone as Clough’s Derby captain Dave Mackay. The film has a very, very good cast across the board.
The main reason I am certain that the film will be very well received by non-football and football fans alike is twofold. Firstly, we have the public’s continued fascination with Brian Howard Clough.
Secondly, allied to this is a story from the pen of David Peace, scripted for cinema by Peter Morgan and carried by the superb Michael Sheen.
Clough justice
Sheen is beyond doubt Britain’s finest character actor at this moment in time and, being only 39 years young, he will only get better. He was not a bad footballer, either – he certainly didn’t need any coaching in that department, and I could quickly see why he caught the eye of Arsenal as a teenager.
In his current release, Frost/Nixon, Michael gives a compelling performance, and while the chap playing Nixon may get a nomination or two here and there, it is Sheen who shines for me, capturing the turmoil of Frost, who, during the part of his life the film covers, is a man on the brink.
He is richly deserving of his recently-awarded OBE. Michael Sheen seems not to merely impersonate any ‘real life’ figure that he has played – be it Nero, Kenneth Williams, Blair, Clough or Frost – he actually appears to ‘become’ the character.
Months of research go into each of his performances. I pointed out to Michael during filming that Clough did not wear a turned up white collar at Derby. This came later, I argued – that he was always smart during this period, even in sportswear.
Michael disagreed, telling me that he had seen a photograph that would suggest otherwise. A few weeks after filming, I hunted among my Clough things and found a photograph of Clough from his tenure at the Baseball Ground, wearing a scruffy sweater, coupled with a creased collar peeping just beneath, and suffice to say it was turned up!
It was fascinating watching him work at close quarters and, having completed four films now – and hoping that this will be my last! – he is, by a country mile, the best of his profession that I have seen at work.
Michael had a great affection for the man he was playing and was absolutely determined to do what he described as “justice to the wonder of Brian”. I can assure you that he does far, far more than that, and I am completely certain that football supporters across the globe will enjoy and embrace the film, which is due for release on March 27 of this year.
Brian power
People question whether somebody with Clough’s methods and abrasive style of man-management would prosper in the modern game. Of course he would – he would be, as he was then, the absolute best!.
Clough was an innovator. He was the first in British football to bring in the concept of the assistant manager in Peter Taylor, and if Clough was around today he would have the best supporting him, sports scientists, physiologists, psychologists, nutritionists – you name it.
He would have adapted, he would still have been ahead of his time, and he was the best that has ever lived.
That type of brain, personality and character would succeed in 1980, 2008 and 2080, absolutely no doubt about that.
Football is an incredibly simple game as Brian often said, and I recently heard Gary Birtles, whom Clough and Peter Taylor plucked from the obscurities of the Northern Counties East League and Long Eaton United, talking about the methods used by the pair during their march to European Cup glory.
“We all knew our jobs – just our jobs,” he said. Simplifying each person’s roles and responsibilities – that’s all football is, a very simple game.
Clough worked on a limited budget at Derby, yet he took the team from the old Second Division to the Division One title and European Cup semi-final in only a short number of years.
He went one better at Nottingham Forest, not only winning the First Division title with another club that he took from the bottom of the Second Division, but also winning back-to-back European Cups. In my opinion, when people talk of the great managers, I can’t see anybody in the modern era – or at any previous time for that matter – who achieved what Clough did with such clubs.
Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, Bill Nicholson. All great managers, but it’s doing things on limited resources that interests me, and it’s that which sets Clough apart. The film will be a fascinating look at one area of his career that didn’t work out, but the fact that it didn't was, I believe, a key factor in his later successes.
Some would say about his latter days that he was rarely seen on the training pitch. In the early days at Derby and at Forest, he was there every day.
He was almost two men – the Clough before the European Cup triumphs and the Clough after them.
After winning two European Cups with Forest, where do you go apart from the England job? That job is, of course, something the Football Association denied him.
I think he adopted a far more relaxed and casual approach to management in the years that followed those balmy European nights at Forest.
Like father, like son?
Nigel Clough has now taken the helm at Derby and I wish him every success possible. Many have pointed out since the appointment that Nigel does not have the same style of management as his father, but this is only in part true.
Nigel certainly doesn’t like the limelight, and he even refused to be paraded onto the pitch ahead of the Manchester United first leg game that followed the announcement that he would become first-team manager at Pride Park. He is perhaps more like his mother in character than his father, but there is a steely streak too.
Young Clough teaches and insists upon the same neat, quick, incisive football to feet as his father and, at Burton, Nigel topped the disciplinary charts with his team in terms of fair play as often as his father did.
He rarely has one-on-one meetings with a player, preferring to sort things out publicly with a player in front of the whole group, exactly the same way his father operated.
He transformed Burton Albion during his decade at the club, both on and off the field. In his time, Burton went from Southern League no hopers to the top of the Blue Square Premier, with points to spare and a spanking new stadium.
It would be unfair for anyone to expect Nigel to even come close to the dizzying heights his father reached, but given time and support from an excellent chairman in Adam Pearson, he has every chance of guiding Derby back up to the top tier of English football.
The benefits of a kick in the teeth
Brian had two advantages that Nigel and many others in football would never experience: tragedy along with a very public failure and humiliation.
The tragedy was the very premature ending of the playing career of the most prolific marksman of his generation on a frozen Roker Park on the 26 December 1962. Brian was only 27 when he was forced to retire through injury.
The very public failure and humiliation came at Leeds United during 44 long days in 1974.
I always maintain that the end of the playing career, coming as it did, was the driving force that took Clough to the glorious days at Derby County.
I firmly believe that it was those chaotic and tumultuous 44 days at Leeds United and the aftermath deep within the Clough psyche that led directly to his greatest triumph, the two European Cups at Nottingham Forest.
As Walt Disney once remarked of his own bankruptcy early in his career, “Sometimes, although you don't see it that way at the time, a kick in the teeth is absolutely the best thing that can happen to you!”
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