The reputation of Brian Clough (pictured) in pop culture history famously got a revisionist jolt in 2006 from David Peace’s novel The Damned United, lending an unsuspected dark mythic importance to his brief, bizarrely dysfunctional tenure as Leeds United FC manager in 1974. The cheeky loudmouth now looked troubled, irrational, even faintly sinister. It was adapted for the cinema in 2009 – in gentler and more conventional terms – starring Michael Sheen. Now Jonny Owen has made an undemanding documentary dealing with the happier era after that, about Clough’s resurgence, managing Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s: the Napoleon of football, leading a little-fancied side to glory in the old first division and the European cup. This affectionate film sets aside all the fashionably “dark” reading of Clough in favour of creating a straightforward memorabilia DVD for fans: there’s loads of archive footage and interviews with the greying surviving veterans. (Clough died in 2004, his right-hand man Peter Taylor in 1990.) It’s enjoyable enough on those terms. There is no Billy-Beane-type “moneyball” explanation for what Clough did; he just seemed to have picked an undervalued side and powered them onwards. An entertaining nostalgiafest.
