"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 am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you've never won any of them fairly. You've done it all by bloody cheating ..."
Brian Clough says hello to the players of Leeds United.
I've just finished The Damned Utd by David Peace, possibly - probably? definitely? - the best book ever written about football. Mixing fact and fiction, internal monologues and real events, there's a chapter for each of Clough's 44-days at Elland Road, interspersed with flashbacks to Derby, Hartlepool and Brighton, players' strikes, boardroom bust-ups and bloody-minded genius. A Shakespearean tragedy in a stream-of-conscious rant, it's almost as good as Old Big Head himself.
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