Dirty Northern Bastards
The Damned United

2,083 words

To do anything to a high level, it has to be a total obsession.
-Conor McGregor

An obsession is when something will not leave your mind.
-Eric Clapton

***

As much as I love movies, and as much as I see them as a potential carrier of the torch of white culture, I never really got on with sports films. I was tempted to write that my favorite sports movie is Rollerball, but that is absurd. Rollerball is not an actual sport. The dour and haunting British Rugby League movie, 1963’s This Sporting Life (starring the thuggish, brilliant Richard Harris), should be mentioned in dispatches, and I remember liking the 1976, little-league baseball comedy The Bad News Bears (particularly for the craggy and hilarious Walter Matthau), but I have spent a lot more time watching sports on TV than sports movies. That was, until I bumped into a film I was dimly aware existed, but had never tracked down, 2009’s The Damned United.

The first thing I thought about the movie was that if I had wanted to commission a screenplay that would doom itself at the box-office, this is the one I would have chosen. Of course there are movies which take as their subject matter very specific and often quite obscure historical incidents, but The Damned United takes obscurity to a new level for a non-English audience. The film centers around the 44-day tenure of Brian Clough as the manager of English Association Football team Leeds United in 1974. I know what you’re thinking, and you are right to do so. Who? Where? What on God’s green earth are you on about? But this is a specialist movie I think can be viewed in complete ignorance of the historical circumstances on which it is based.

Brian Clough was a football manager, as well as being an unlikeable, arrogant, immodest, self-centered braggart of a man who reminds me of Kirk Douglas’ description of Stanley Kubrick after the pair worked on the 1957 movie, Paths of Glory: “He’s a talented shit.” Clough was often referred to colloquially as “the best manager England never had” after he was overlooked for the job coaching the national side (though most people just called him “old bighead”). This has passed into English folklore in the same way as “Enoch Powell was the best Prime Minister Britain never had” although the latter should only be whispered in today’s Britain. Clough also achieved feats in the game which were exceptional and, as this film gradually reveals, he had both a strangely moral temperament that he tried to pass on to his players, and an obsession with one rival in particular.

The movie uses two editing devices which, if used well, are enjoyable simply from the point of view of cinematics: actual period footage of the football, and a flashback/flash-forward time signature for the narrative. The opening sequence features real clips of Leeds players in the 1960s and 1970s and, ripped out of context, they show United as a bunch of thugs. Everyone said so at the time, I remember. But they still won everything except, as Clough wryly notes in the film, the fabled European Cup. The rivalry between Clough and Don Revie centers the film, and I was very grateful to the producers for showing a true picture of football fans in the 1970s, which is not the image portrayed by the media, then or now. Football hooligans were everywhere, according to the press, violent racists who didn’t care about football and just wanted a tear-up. This is largely mythology. Contrary to what we are told is the case today, Britain – and even football crowds – were not hotbeds of spittle-flecked racist bootboys. That is one of the worst calumnies cast on young white men by the modern media, who will never allow the viewpoint of amoral, separatist racism. We don’t hate black people or wish them harm. We just don’t want to be around them.

What there was in British football when I was in my teenage years was a robust north/south rivalry. A familiar chant once a team from north of Oxford United got south of Watford was “YOU DIRTY NORTHERN BASTARDS!” It was interesting to hear, because anyone from London and the south would pronounce “bastard” with a long first syllable, as in “bar”. This chant featured the short, northern inflection, as in “bat”. Football fans, even before the game went from working class to middle class in terms of its fan base, didn’t want to sound posh.

So, this montage of shocking tackles and flying fists sets up the moral arc of the movie, which is that when Clough takes over at Leeds for exactly the same period of time as Liz Truss would later be the Prime Minister of the UK for, he tells the players to their faces what he thinks of their tactics. He calls them cheats, calls Leeds United “bad champions”, and you can almost hear the clock start to tick on Clough’s tenure.

When you have a whiff of cognitive dissonance in a movie, it usually means good things for the viewer, and so it does here. Clough despises Leeds’ heavy-handed – and heavy-footed – tactics and wants them stopped, believing football to be a “beautiful game” (he may even have coined that proverbial phrase). But his obsession with Don Revie, the Leeds United manager who left the club to take over the management of England (the post Clough was marked for but never got) passes over from simple sportsmanship into near-pathological obsession. He reveres the man’s achievements and despises the man for the methods that got him those achievements.

When Clough attends his first board meeting at Leeds (a city portrayed as gloomy as it actually is), the speech he gives – and actor Michael Sheen’s delivery – are as beautifully constructed as the best goals you’ll see on the field. The board are incensed about Clough’s recent TV interview, and the remarks he made about Revie and Leeds. Revie, although not at the meeting, is equally incandescent with rage. Clough calmly explains his motives when asked by the head of the board why he got the feeling this was all about Clough and Revie. The speech is worth quoting in full:

Of course it’s about me and Don. It’s always been about me and Don. But, instead of putting frowns on your faces, all ye elders of Leeds in your blazers and your brass fucking buttons, it should put big, wide, Colgate smiles on your big, wide faces because it means I won’t eat, I won’t sleep, until I’ve taken whatever that man’s achieved and beaten it, beaten it so I never have to hear the name Don fucking Revie again, beat it so the only name anyone says in the Yorkshire ale-houses as they raise their stinking jars to their stinking mouths is Brian Clough. Brian Clough, über fucking alles.

Long pause. “Understand?”

That is near-Shakespearean to my ear, and is a speech which is rapidly becoming, for me and my rewatch list, up there with the Rutger Hauer’s “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” speech in Blade Runner, and De Niro’s “this is this” speech holding up the bullet in The Deer Hunter. Watch the trailer for The Damned United, by all means (bizarrely, it has an American voiceover, and I assume that meant they were trying to sell the film to an American audience. Best of luck with that, lads), but if I were trying to sell the film to you (which, in a way, I am), then watch the boardroom scene. If nothing else, it proves that English character acting is alive and well this cinematic century amid the woke prancing that passes for much modern British screen thespianism.

The casting is superb, and this is some of the finest recent English film acting I’ve seen. Michael Sheen is known for his ability to recreate characters from life, and he played a convincing Tony Blair (to David Morrissey’s Gordon Brown) in the 2003 drama The Deal. His accent mimics Clough’s so closely his voice should get an award. (Perhaps the award ceremonies should have a new category). And his timing is as good as Clough’s was on the pitch, where he played for Middlesborough (a town in which he grew up close to Revie), Sunderland and England. A board member shouts at him as he leaves the room.

“Who the bloody hell do you think you are?”

Sheen stops at the door and says calmly,

“Brian Clough. Brian Howard Clough”.

Clough’s assistant, Peter Taylor, is played by one of England’s greatest living character actors, Timothy Spall, generally known for comedy work with the likes of Mike Leigh, but able to turn his hand to serious drama, as he showed by playing the great English artist, J. M. Turner, in 2014’s Mr. Turner. The owner of Leeds United is played by Jim Broadbent, another brilliant player of irascible old duffers, and the star of one of the best pieces of English comedy I have ever seen, 1992’s A Sense of History. (If you enjoy English comedy, that’s one you will want to see). And the actor playing Don Revie, Colm Meaney, is one of those miracles of casting because he is a dead ringer for Don Revie, who looked like a retired boxer who’d also worked as not a very good doorman.

So, The Damned United is a brilliant central performance supported by a stalwart ensemble cast, and it’s as English as it comes. With the exception of a couple of Celts, that is, (this was way before black players began to feature in the top flight of English football), the Irishman Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner, the fiery – and extremely violent – Scottish captain of Leeds. For a while, Bremner had the record for the fastest booking in FA Cup Final history, something absurd like 47 seconds, I think. The actor playing Bremner here would go on to a part in Peaky Blinders, and was the writer of a piece I covered in the last Union Jackal, Adolescence. He makes a good Bremner, who really was a dirty northern bastard.

The film also got me to thinking about what England was like before Tony Blair’s version of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. What motivated it, what did it get out of bed for in the morning? One of the big answers is football. Football was the great working man’s sport. Although cricket was always called the national sport of the English, that’s just because its reputation as a gentleman’s game did a diplomatic service to the upper class. There was rugby, but that was more Celtic. There was a saying that football is a game watched by hooligans and played by gentlemen, while rugby is a game watched by gentlemen and played by hooligans, and there is some truth in that.

Football was the soul of England, in terms of sports (although motorcycle speedway, on which I’m planning a piece, gave it a real run in the 1950s), and the nation’s working men lived and breathed it. The Damned United is set during the last era before football changed from being a working-class game to one patronized by the middle classes. They liked roughing it, culturally speaking, tousling their hair and their accents, dressing like casuals and saying “geezer” and “jog on, son, and don’t mug me off” because they had seen the execrable Football Factory-type movies that were prevalent at that time.

When I watch a movie for the first time I watch it straight through. Then, if it merits attention, I watch it again, straight away. It takes longer. Notes, references, who wrote it, was it based on a book, who was the cinematographer? Film-reviewer stuff, still in the marrow from the old days when that was (partly) what I did. Then I watch it again, straight through. If I go back a fourth time, just for the sheer pleasure of it, I know it has become part of my rewatch, wind-down pantheon. If you are tired but not sleepy, you can slip into a familiar film as you would a comfortable old pair of slippers.

Give The Damned United a first watch. At present, it is here on YouTube in sequential videos which all link just fine. As Clough says to one of his players (I think it’s Colin Todd) at Derby County in the dressing-room before a game against Leeds:

“Enjoy yourself. You’ve earned it. You’ve worked hard. This week”.