“I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in luck. I believe in football.”
Brian Clough, The Damned Utd

It was a night match between Leeds United and Derby County and the rain machines were on. The cast was drenched and the mood was black. For two hours the actors had been traipsing off the pitch at Saltergate and into the dressing-room. Now there was a mutiny on the cards and some made for the showers. “It was the coldest I’d ever been in my life,” Mick Jones, the Leeds striker, mused. It was gone midnight by the time they all finally drove home with towels wrapped around them and sodden dreams of Tinseltown.

This is a snapshot from behind the scenes at The Damned United. The film of David Peace’s controversial book, depicting Brian Clough’s tumultuous 44 days in charge of Leeds in 1974, is due out in March and promises to be a riot of hatchet men, bitter rivalries and bouffant haircuts.

It could scarcely be better timed, too, with Nigel Clough having taken over this week at Derby County, the club where his father’s legend was born and who form a parallel plot in Peace’s book. “But all your dreams are nightmares and all your hopes are hells,” Peace wrote of the aftermath of Derby’s championship season in 1972. “There is a war coming, a civil bloody war.” That bitter denouement is ingrained in the mind of every fortysomething Derby fan.

The film promises to buck the trend for risible football films. Rather than suggesting that Michael Caine and an Ipswich Town has-been could shore up the defence and thus bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany (Escape to Victory), the tale of Clough and Don Revie is a psychological drama with screw-in studs.

Simon Clifford, the voluble figure who made a million from his Brazilian Soccer Schools before teaming up briefly with Sir Clive Woodward at Southampton, is Mick Jones. He was invited to be a consultant on the film by Peace and ended up playing a cameo role, casting footballers and even coaching Michael Sheen — Clough in the film — on his voice.

Sheen, the acclaimed actor who has played figures such as Tony Blair, Kenneth Williams and David Frost, rose to the challenge. “We were having a penalty shoot-out one day with the Leeds and Derby players,” Clifford said of last summer’s shoot. “Michael came up totally in character and ranted, ‘Oi, Clifford, you are a bloody disgrace missing the target from there, you want bloody shooting.’ He never stopped, even when the cameras weren’t on him. Afterwards he said he hoped he had done justice to Brian — that’s all he wanted to do.”

Whether the book did justice to Clough has divided opinion. Some view it as a work of near genius, while others see it as a fictional slur. Johnny Giles, the former Leeds midfield player, received an apology in court and the young actor playing the Irishman finished filming worried that his lines were heading for the cutting-room floor.

Clifford has done his bit to see that Clough gets fair treatment. A diehard fan of Old Big ’Ead, Clifford has Clough’s old desk from the City Ground in his garage in Leeds. “The film’s not dark in any way,” he said. “David’s book focused on Brian at a particular time, this is slightly broader. But I don’t want to give too much away.”

Clifford is responsible for the accuracy of the football scenes, so often the nadir of films featuring the game. After the casting of the main characters, he was left to make up the teams and held trials at Garforth Town, the UniBond League first division north club that he owns.

“We wanted people who had a physical resemblance to the player in question, but they also needed to be able to kick a football,” he said. “I think the football scenes I’ve choreographed in films have been good. They said There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble was no good, but that Lewis McKenzie, the lead, could play. Well, I got a call from the line producer saying they were shooting in six weeks and they had a problem with Lewis. They were right. He was meant to have magic boots but I’d never seen anyone as useless. That was hard work.”

Then there was Bend It Like Beckham, the film that launched the careers of Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra. “We trained on Clapham Common for three months before filming started,” Clifford said. “People were laughing because they thought I was a women’s coach and I only had two players turning up. We had a bag of balls and worked eight hours a day. By the end Mindy was curling free kicks over a wall and into the top corner nine times out of ten.”

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