Warts and all life of Brian

Peace has researched his subject assiduously, listing 36 source books, among them David Storey’s This Sporting Life and John Braine’s Room at the Top. He has borrowed their arid expressiveness and sense of place and set it to a rhythm of repetition similar to W. H. Auden or Tony Harrison. The prose is like studs clank-clanking on a changing room floor, always alliterative.

Mostly the rich fusion is satisfying but — as with any work with a bold stylistic objective — it grates sporadically and the exercise can eclipse the story.

The widescreen imagination is all his own and he lays it out unfettered. His ability to “become Clough” is disconcertingly convincing and this characterisation gives the book its dynamism.

The only hitch in presenting such a well drawn portrait, especially for the sport-informed reader, comes in extricating the real Clough from the fictional one.

While marvelling at Peace’s inventiveness and recognising the sanctity of artistic licence, the reader is often nagged by the thought (and consequently drawn away from the narrative), is this real or made up? At least Peace’s approach sidesteps the problem of most sports fiction where an imaginary setting lends an unshakeable comic value. However realistic and liniment-soaked the text, as soon as an author mentions a game against Ironcastle United or an away trip to Cromford Bridge, believability ebbs away.

Since Clough is no longer with us and therefore outside the dominion of libel law, Peace is at liberty to portray him as he wishes, which is generally unfavourably. We are all familiar with his out-sized ego but the alcoholism, greed, selfishness and stupidity is also finely detailed; maybe it’s in those other 34 books and Peace has merely condensed the blemishes into one bruise.

Only in his dealings with his family, especially his sons, are we shown Clough’s considerate side. Amid the rants and rows and smashed-up office furniture, he invariably has a pat on the head, a ruffle of the hair, for an offspring.

Faber has presumably had its lawyers rake through the text for potential defamation of those still alive.

Few players or managers have dignity or decency painted upon them. They are almost all universally hard, out for themselves, fiddling, conniving and getting their retaliation in first.

Peace understands implicitly that football clubs are mini Roman empires, with shin pads instead of shields, tracksuits instead of togas.

Clough is the emperor back from conquering foreign territories, bestowed a kingdom where he is despised by his subjects. In the shadows lurk usurpers such as Giles, Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer; men with a glint in their eye, a knife in their hands. Clough deserves his downfall (albeit with a hearty pay-off) because, similarly to many visited by greatness, he fails to recognise its limits, to understand where confidence runs into arrogance or that expediency is superior to bravado.

Each year, one or two football books cross over to the mainstream, and Peace’s is well positioned to make this journey. He has found one of sport’s most intriguing stories, teeming with characters and sub-plots, and set about it with panache.

Football lovers will feel that in his scramble to stack high bricks fired in bleakness he has neglected the joy of the game, the humour, but that is another book, another story. This one knows that its place is with the avaricious and the megalomaniacs, sifting briskly through the grime and happy to be there.