I had quite a few reservations about going to see it. They said a lot of it was made up and they portrayed Clough in a bad light but I disagree. The Derby side of the story was mostly accurate and I though Clough came out of it pretty favourably. There was only one scene of him drinking, they hardly portrayed him as a drunk, as apparently the book did.
Michael Sheen plays Clough, he who did Tony Blair in The Queen, so at first it's a little difficult to take him seriously but he is actually rather good as Cloughie, delivering all those famous Clough quotes.
Don Revie (well played by Colm Meaney) was once Clough's idol but the reason he grew to hate Revie was apparently because he did not shake his hand when Leeds came to Derby and beat them in the FA Cup Third Round in 1968.
The film flicks backwards and forwards between his brief time at Leeds and his much longer spell at Derby but there is a helpful graphic that rolls the years backwards and forwards so that flashback averse folk like me can keep up. The film uses a lot of archive footage, to which they cleverly superimposed the actors from the film over their real life equivalents.
The 1970's football scene is captured well and the stadiums recreated in all their dilapidated glory. Not sure Derby's Baseball Ground was ever quite that ramshackle but it was a good effort. Did 1970's dressing rooms really have ashtrays for each player? It was an age when many tackles were actually cases of GBH of which Leeds were (allegedly) the masters but they were also a very good side, as two championships show. Although it's hard to believe that when you look at the physical state of some of the actors chosen to play the Leeds players. Many of them seemed too old; Bremner and Clarke wouldn’t see 40 again. Others though were good likenesses.
If anything, it would have been nice to have had more of the Leeds side of the story. The players were described as Revie's surrogate sons but little was shown of the Don Revie era, so we don't really get a feel for that.
Yes, there were inaccuracies and also some stuff surprisingly left out. No mention was made of the fact that the teams met again in 1968 in the League Cup Semi-Final as Clough started to weave his magic at Derby. Although Leeds won both legs, Clough's revenge did actually came much quicker than in the film, as Derby beat Leeds 4-1 in their first home game against them after being promoted in 1969. The 2-1 win in the film never happened and the 5-0 drubbing that was highlighted actually came much later in the 1972-73 season after Derby were crowned champions.
In fact little is made of Derby pipping Leeds to the title that year, you'd have thought Clough would have crowed a bit about that particular victory.
Jim Broadbent is excellent as Sam Longson, Derby's chairman and Clough leaves Derby when 'Uncle' Sam takes seriously his resignation attempt. In truth Longson is glad to be shut of him. Clough's assistant Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) persuades him to take over at lowly Brighton and the sequence of events was changed here too. I've no idea why. Clough and Taylor were actually in charge at Brighton for 32 games and not as the film implied, that Clough left before he even started work there. They could have included some of their time at Brighton and he also didn't go back after he left Leeds.
The film suggests that he took the Leeds job because he wanted to eclipse Revie's achievements there. Not that it works out that way at Leeds. He upset all the players from day one when he told them to throw all their medals in the bin because they hadn't won anyone of them fairly. He never got the dressing room back after that and was dismissed after seven games.
He got the last laugh in the end and did pretty well at Nottingham Forest, whilst Revie failed as England manager and was then charged with bringing the game into disrepute when he left to manage the UAE.
The film is less of a film, more of an interesting history lesson and despite the inaccuracies, it's a good one. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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