The Damned United
15, Nationwide
The Damned United is, I suppose, a football film but if you don’t like football don’t let this put you off. (If you do, I’ll hear about it, and then you’ll be in trouble.) I liked it enormously even though football bores me stiff and I don’t know the first thing about it, although please, please — and I’m begging you here — don’t take this as a cue to get all the condiments out of the cupboard and start explaining the offside rule to me or I shall have to say to you, ‘Put the malt vinegar away, love, before I punch you on the nose. See how my fingers are already forming into a fist?’ The thing you must understand is that when I say there will be trouble, there will be trouble. And noses might get bloodied.
Anyway, it’s based on the book of the same name by David Peace and is about football manager Brian’s Clough’s doomed, disastrous, 44-day sojourn at Leeds United in 1974.
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