The Damned UTD - David Peace

A different book than I was expecting I think that would be a fair way to describe my feelings towards The Damned Utd. The book tells the story of Brian Howard Clough the legendary outspoken football manager of both Derby County and Leeds United and his desperate, yet overall futile attempts to command a sense of authority over his Leeds United players after his appointment to the club following in the footsteps of bitter rival Don Revie. The book places the reader in the shoes of Brian Clough and tells the story from his fictional perspective. Unfortunately the author decides that Clough perspective is to repeat most things numerous times throughout each ...  Read the complete review

"Gentlemen, I might as well tell you now. You lot may have won all the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, as far as I'm concerned, the first thing you can do for me is chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest f***ing dustbin you can find, because you've never won any of them fairly. You've done it all by bl**ding cheating." So spoke the fictionalised words of the fictionalised Brian Clough, regarded as one of the finest English managers to have ever graced the game. The focus of this novel is a period of 44 days in which Clough was manager of Leeds United. The story is ...  Read the complete review

"The Damned Utd" is David Peace's dramatised account of Brian Clough's forty-four day reign as manager of Leeds United in 1974. In addition to those days it also covers happier times for Clough when he was the manager of Derby County, from 1962. This was one of the stranger aspects of the book. It doesn't tell the story chronologically, instead the stories overlap, with seldom more than a few pages of the one time period occurring before it flips back to the other. This could have been (and on occasion is) a little confusing. However, Peace has put the Derby story in italics and whilst this is more difficult to read it does make it ...  Read the complete review

Writing a work of fiction about real life people is a legal disaster waiting to happen. If you decided to write about a noticeable person and fictionalise them as a serial killing maniac, that person is rightly going to be upset and sue you for all your worth. There are instances that this is not so much an issue. Historic fiction often uses real life people and places them in fictional situations based in fact. Personally, I think the best historic approach is to create a fictional character and have them interact with other real life people e.g. Richard Sharpe. The other tactic for modern day books about real people is to change the names and some of the ...  Read the complete review