Football Food For Thought / Dan Fitch / 11 March 2009 /

The film adaptation of David Peace's novel about Brian Clough's infamous forty four days in charge at Leeds United will premier later this month and Dan Fitch, for one, can't wait for it. In the meanwhile, can Clough Jr go some way to emulating his famous father's achievements at Derby?

There have been many great films about sport. Raging Bull, He Got Game, The Hustler, Caddyshack and Seabiscuit all spring to mind, but it is strange that the greatest sport of all hasn't inspired a really good film.

Football films tend to be terrible. The action on pitch seems to be more difficult to replicate than in other sports and ends up looking unrealistic. The plots seem to come straight from the pages of Roy of the Rovers: you know the hero will always bag a last minute goal and get the girl of his dreams, etc.

The nadir of the genre may well be the Sean Bean vehicle When Saturday Comes, a football film that leaves no cliché unturned. Then there's Best, which is shown on Sky Movies at least once a week, due to the fact that the film was produced by the now defunct, Sky Pictures. Some of the casting is genius. Jerome of Robson & Jerome fame as Bobby Charlton and Roger Daltrey as Rodney Marsh, are particular highlights.

Unfortunately they got the casting of the eponymous George Best all wrong. John Lynch is way too old and not nearly handsome enough to pull off the role. He looks more like Pete Townsend, which becomes very surreal when he shares screen-time with Daltrey as Rodney Marsh. You half expect them to start playing Substitute.

Escape to Victory is probably the most successful effort at a football film. Yet it's appeal stems from the presence of Michael Caine, the silliness of Sly Stallone playing a goalkeeper and the fun of picking out all the old Ipswich Town players, rather than any real claim of cinematic greatness.

We might finally get a great football film when The Damned United hits cinemas later this month. Unlike most football movies, it's based upon great source material. There are even fewer successful novels about football than there are films, but David Peace's tale of Brian Clough's forty four days in charge of Leeds United, was a brilliant bit of fiction, which perfectly captured the voice of the nasal narrator.

The novel gives equal weight to the story of Clough's success as a manager, as he leads unfashionable Derby County to the league championship. This runs parallel to the telling of Clough's problems at Leeds and whilst the juxtaposition works well enough on the page, it will be interesting to see how this translates to the three-act structural conventions of the screen.

The film's producers will be thankful that their creation is likely to create even more column inches in the next month, due to the fact that the current Derby County side are once more managed by a member of the Clough clan.

The young Nigel is depicted on screen by the child actor Oliver Stokes, while the real Nigel is now 42 years old and has taken on his father's old job at Derby. Following in the footsteps of Brian Clough was never going to be easy, which is perhaps why Nigel was content for so long to learn his trade out of the spotlight, at Burton Albion.

Since joining Derby in January, Clough's side have climbed the table and more crucially for the fans, beaten Nottingham Forest twice. Derby are now a distant [13.0] to be relegated and Clough Jnr will hope to ensure promotion to the top flight , next season just as Clough Snr once did.

Over at Brian's other old club Leeds United, things aren't looking so positive. Automatic promotion from League 1 is now nothing more than a mathematical possibility. Leeds can be backed at [3.65] to go up through the lottery of the play-offs.

It's always a treat to see a larger than life character brought back to life on the screen and one would expect Michael Sheen to make a fine job at playing Old Big Head, though I'm equally looking forward to the brilliant casting of Timothy Spall as Peter Taylor.

If The Damned United is any kind of success, perhaps it's legacy will be to demonstrate that the most interesting stories in football are the ones that occur off the pitch.

George Best's life got more interesting and chaotic after he retired. Then there are the tragedies of the Busby Babes and Grande Torino. Escape To Victory was a feel-good version of the story of the Kiev death match and if there are producers are looking for another flawed genius to follow Clough on screen, then look no further than Paul Gascoigne.

Just don't cast either Ant or Dec.

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