He's Fucking Codding, is Clough

On re-reading The Damned Utd, before going to see the film.

I think the novel is a brave attempt to write as someone else. Someone who was, in a way, public property for a long time, partly out of choice. So one of the difficulties for the author is that people already think they know this character. The temptation for the writer must then be to try and uncover new things about the man: but he is recently dead, and so emotions and relationships are raw, and unbiased evidence thin on the ground. How do you get round this? You let the man himself speak - copy interviews and columns - and you invent a personality. In this case you have an author whose speciality is State of the Nation type stuff. So your invented personality contains elements of what you understand to be the contemporary culture, and what you believe to be key elements of the time. In this case: despair, anger, and collapse generally. These become, in the case of Brian Clough, the dominant elements of the characterisation in the novel.

However I don't think David Peace is deliberately casting Clough in a bad light, or defaming him, as far as that is possible: I think he is trying to pinpoint the essence of a man through his time, and through his greatest failure. In a way, how we deal with failure is key to how we develop as people. By showing the range of emotions at this time from despair to a kind of false hope, to a thirst for vengeance, the author is simply drawing a kind of human life. It doesn't mean that he hates Clough, or thinks he was overrated, or whatever: but that drawing a crisis in someone's life is a more valuable exercise in creating or re-creating their character.

It's a good book, at times falling a little flat - the segments on the death of Clough's mother are brief and you don't get a deep sense of how this impacted him - and sometimes veering into pretension (the repetition. It repeats. Again and again it repeats. Over and Over. Over), but is an excellent imaginative novel and also a great contribution to cultural history. Read it.

Beauty

As is well known, I adore beauty, especially free flowing curves, gorgeous waves, inward and outward movements, slides, bodies you can slip and down on, full bodies and things you can really hold and be held by.

Accordingly here is the only thing in the world as beautiful as women:




And it's called The European Cup and *not* The Champions League Trophy or some such rubbish.

Football eh? Sex, more like.

More Dishonest Bastards

A report out yesterday from "Wembley", actually a front for a group of fascist Doncasterites, suggests that Leeds lost the play off final.

Well.

Someone hasn't been doing their research well. A study earlier this year by B Remner, "Leeds Are Fucking Amazing" showed that Leeds actually should have been in the Premier League; and another large-scale study, "Fuck Me This Is Shit" by Bye Tsurl-Egs, showed that the act of Leeds' being in League One was inherently unfair. Attempts by dishonest Man Utd fans to discredit these studies were roundly dismissed by impartial, peer reviewed publications such as "Fuck Everyone Else: Leeds Are Ace" and it is only reactionary fuckwits on the other side of the Pennines who don't think that Leeds should be in the top flight.

Attempts by "Mad Mans" to perniciously discredit the achievements of Leeds have failed, or rather have not failed. But in terms of truth, some sort of right, they have failed. The position of Leeds in League One AGAIN is an injustice, a testament to the power of bigotry. It is the right of all Leeds fans to be in the Premier League, and the constant distortion of this right by men in suits, or rather fuckwits in shorts, is an affront to the control all Leeds fans ought to have over their own team.

Football, Bloody Hell

Hey that was really cool. There really is nowt like a good penalty shoot-out, especially when it goes into sudden-death penalty. Poor John Terry's abortive attempt practically handed the trophy to Utd and Anelka's did.

And Sir Bobby Charlton was first in the line for a medal. Good on you, Sir Bobby, and on all of your teams of 58 and 68.

All Credit to the Lads

Incredibly, unbelievably, Carshalton Athletic have escaped relegation on the final day of the season. With one round of matches to go they were 2nd from bottom of the Ryman Premier Division and with 4 going down it was looking pretty dicey. Amazingly though they have finished 5th from bottom on 50 points and escape relegation by (to my delirious calculations) a +4 goal difference on the team below them.

Carshalton is the Drummer ancestral seat. Whereas I may be exiled elsewhere, the Robins are the drummer's natural team.

A Beauty Scored by Bobby Charlton

Alas your humble drummer is, as predicted, _working_. This ghastly state of affairs, nearly as awful as sobriety, means that I am unable to post with the vigour and intelligence my readers have not come to expect.

So, today, given our nearness to the Munich disaster, and football's sudden discovery of history (a close companion to cricket fans), a quotation from the great man, courtesy of the Daily Getsworse:

Even now, 50 years later, it reaches down and touches me every day. Sometimes I feel it quite lightly, a mere brush stroke across an otherwise happy mood. Sometimes it engulfs me with terrible regret and sadness - and guilt that I walked away and achieved so much. Everything I have been able to achieve since that day has been accompanied by a simple question - why me?


We've heard, read, about this phenomenon, but to hear it from one of our footballing greats (our only surviving one, maybe?) is stalling and frightening. Like Harry Patch, 109, who lived for 80 years without talking about the Western Front (until his family were dying and there was no longer any reason to bury the memories),Sir Bobby has kept a lot of this to himself until very recently. Could it be - just possibly - that you _need_ to suppress, if not repress, awful memories in order to survive, because they will come and bite you on the arse anyway, so why would you want to give them free rein on your rotund and peachy buttocks?

Er..where was I...well, anyway, you get the point. As I've said before, and as Will Self wrote in _Grey Area_, the talking cure may well in fact be the talking curse.

And if you want TD to open up about his problems you can fuck right off.

Tsk. Typical of me to turn a post about Sir Bobby Charlton into a post about myself. I need to talk less and think more, since the two are mutually exclusive. My talk is a series of lies, designed for an audience, a script and a load of bullshit.

And as for my blogging....

Sir Bobby, we have no idea how you feel, and to pretend otherwise is impertinent, arrogant and ghastly. Nonetheless. We are glad for your survival. More, probably, than you will ever know.

Football. Isn't it...you know...Giggsy Wiggsy...

As regular readers will know I'm more of a cricket man but I do enjoy watching football and there is little to compare with the UEFA Champions League, surely the greatest club competition in existence, only 50 years old but with great myths and narratives: Real Madrid of the 50s, the Munich disaster and United's 68 win, Celtic, Ajax, Bayern, the great AC Milan side of the 1990s and, of course, Liverpool. A match like Liverpool v Barcelona, is more than football. Bound up in Liverpool is a tradition of working class life, now on the way out; a tradition of success and tragedy, a claim to international greatness. Bound up in Barcelona is regional and national identity, a way of life, politics, history and a method of football. Bringing these diverse strands together is what club football does very well and the Champions League in particular manages to mix with a kind of generally healthy nationalism and, rather more rarely, a European outlook. The European Cup predates the Treaty of Rome. Having said that about its nationalism, it has not always been this way, which brings me back to where I started. The competition we have today has been forged, as well as built by its past, including its worst moment: Heysel. Some have learned more than others from that and it is good to see English clubs, now nearly a generation away from that moment, reclaiming their places at the heart of a tough but often inspired competition. I'm no Liverpool fan but I'm delighted for them and I will be supporting all the UK clubs tonight, with an especially hopeful eye on Celtic.

Good Sport

Another sporting post. England got stuffed (their own manager's words) at Rugby by Ireland yesterday, 43-13, a record defeat. Your drummer is an Englishman by birth and sympathy but in 1920 his antecedents (father's side)were involved on the republican side in precisely the war which is so important to Croke Park itself and Hill 16 (a side of the stadium built on the rubble of O Connell Street)in particular.
Despite the predictions of some, the performance of God Save the Queen was well observed and the match a mixture of wonderful attacking rugby by Ireland and pisspoor skills, tactics and performance by England. I thought before the game that the whole occasion would have made it very difficult for even a good England side to win, but for a poor one - it was an impossible task.

I wouldn't change it for the world, though. The game was played. The world moves on.

Area Newspaper Harsh on Substitute's Performance

The Cotswold Journal is just that - a journal for the Cotswolds. Its sports reports are mainly those of ultra-non league clubs in the area, like, say Bourton Rovers. These guys are amateurs in the true sense of the word: they play sport because they love it, not for financial reward. They play in front of some trees, and enjoy doing so. Which makes this week's Journal's report on Bourton Rovers somewhat distressing (I imagine) for the local man (whom I vaguely know) who came on as a sub during a recent game. He gets the headline AND a paragraph all to himself.

Payne error causes pain!
By Sportsdesk
Kingswood 2, Bourton Rovers 1 ROVERS travelled to second in the table Kingswood confident of a victory after their six-goal mauling of Huntley seven days earlier.

...However, they still restricted Kingswood to only one effort on target but it was a crucial one as it found the net!

An initial shot was blocked on the line by substitute Mark Payne but, with the ball at his feet, he was caught in two minds and, instead of blasting the ball away, he tried passing it out and it hit a home striker and rolled over the line.

Now far be it from me to correct the work of print journalists but this guy works at something else and plays footie because he likes it. Now he's been embarrassed and humiliated in the local press. You mean bunch of bastards! Here's a new story for you then: "Local Paper's Stupid Reporting Contributes to Obesity Crisis as Area Grown Ups Refuse to be Humiliated by PissPoor Hacks."

What next? My puffing and panting in the gym, as my voluminous stomach wobbles alarmingly? "Drummer's Stomach 'Too Big' Says Local Gym Owner"?