How I fell in love with The Damned United

By Steve Anglesey in Mirror Football Blog

Published 21:22 19/08/10

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Sunday Mirror sports writer Anthony Clavane's new book, 'Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United', is out now.

It has already been praised by a number of critics. 'The Damned Utd' author David Peace called it "brilliant". Distinguished football writer Brian Glanville wrote: "It's one of the best football books I've read for a long time." And Patrick Barclay, of The Times, urged his readers, to "read Promised land, even if you're not a Leeds fan. It's wonderfully written."

Promised Land, wrote Janine Self, on the Sports Journalists Association website "is a mini-history of Leeds the football club, from City to United, from Herbert Chapman to Don Revie, from Howard Wilkinson to David O’Leary, from glory days to goldfish bills, from European heights to virtual oblivion. But this is a story with a difference. Clavane has cleverly interwoven the story of his ancestors, the Jewish immigrants who fled eastern Europe and settled in Leeds. As they shook off the ghetto and moved into the suburbs, so they shifted from watching rugby league to following football.

"Clavane, erudite, educated, an adopted southerner, hardly ascribes to the Elland Road stereotype, yet there is an emotional intravenous drip connecting him to Yorkshire’s West Riding. A wordsmith’s ability, coupled with a history teacher’s instinct, and framed by a deep passion for all things from the city of Leeds, has resulted in an extraordinary book."

Here is an exclusive extract for Mirror Football readers:

I grew up in the 1960s, so my Leeds - or my idea of Leeds - is a place of mobility, transformation, escape. An irresistible force, a harbinger of an exciting future, a portent of the deliverance to come.

As the train pulls into the station, and the glittering sets of residential towers lining the river come into view, I only have eyes for the brooding town hall and the cantilevered football stadium, the city's two great monuments to metamorphosis. They both symbolise for me Leeds' desire to cross the threshold, to breach the narrow confines of its rough, isolated world. Up until the Industrial Revolution it had been largely landlocked, surrounded by dense forest.

In times of crisis, the city burdens itself with a chippy isolationism, retreating into the worst of itself, a perverse mixture of fear - usually of the foreigner - and brutality.

"Every late-twentieth century slur on Pakistanis," reflected the Leeds-born writer Martin Wainwright, writing about his hometown, "has its early-twentieth century equivalent about the Jews ('filthy, dirty, the lowest and worst sort') or the nineteenth-century Irish, whose supposedly inbred slumminess led to typhus being nicknamed the Irish disease. Both of those groups reacted to racism by rioting. In the Jewish and Irish cases that actually led to deaths."

At its best, however, usually in booming economic times, Leeds tries to break boundaries, extend the parameters of the possible, turn the world upside down. This is the Leeds I love. We are Leeds and we are always trying to escape the inescapable, embrace the exotic, worship the Other - a Michael Marks, a Montague Burton, an Albert Johanneson, a Lucas Radebe. Which is why, as the railway curves around the football stadium, my heart always lifts. And, as a low sea of industrial units parts to allow the vast monolith to rear up out of its pitiless heartland, I feel that I'm home, back where I started, on the threshold of possibility.

1972. This Leeds side are just turning it on. Seven-nil up against Southampton and, as Barry Davies tells the nation, it's almost cruel. "And every man jack of this Leeds side is putting on a show. Hunter collects the ball deep in his own half and passes it to Gray. Gray pushes forward and passes to Bremner, who passes to Giles just inside the Southampton half. Giles passes forward to Jones who pushes the ball back to Hunter."

Leeds are on top of the world. Hunter hits a cross-field ball to Madeley. Madeley to Clarke. Clarke back to Bremner. Thirty thousand Leeds fans chant Ole!

"And to say that Leeds are playing with Southampton is the understatement of the season. Bremner to Gray, Gray back to Bremner, Bremner backheels to Madeley. And poor Southampton just don't know what day it is."

And as Bremner hits a long crossfield ball to Reaney, who beats three players and finds Giles - who puts his left foot around his right and chips the ball to Clarke - I look out at the Leeds skyline, sturdy and prickly against the sky. And I can see, almost touch, the promised land.

Leeds began the 1973/4 season by winning their first eight matches - and then cantered to a second League Championship. For two years now they had been, quite simply, mesmeric. After they had gone unbeaten in their first twenty-nine games of the campaign even longstanding critics joined in the adulation. Dirty Leeds were now Super Leeds.

As the players displayed their medals at a victory parade on the town hall balcony, it was evident that the Town Hall - the grime-coated shrine to Cuthbert Brodrick's ambition - had been scrubbed clean. A dilute acid solution had been brushed on the building's stonework to loosen the soot and dirt. Low-pressure pumps had then sent jets of water on to the masonry.

Revie told the crowd that they were now ready to conquer Everest. Next season they would win the European Cup, just as he'd predicted when he first took over all those years ago. But the last few hundred feet, he warned, were always the hardest to climb. This was the crucial bit, the Hillary Step, the death zone, the altitude above which oxygen was so depleted that no amount of acclimatisation would allow humans to function properly. This was where many of the world's greatest mountaineers had perished. One giant leap, though, one last push, and we'd be there. Next year in Jerusalem.

1974. A panoramic view of the new Leeds. The new, towering floodlights - the biggest in Europe. The old industrial landscape is disappearing; the belching chimneys and massive brick edifices have gone. Giles to Bremner, who passes to Gray, who slides it to Hunter. And Leeds United are turning on a brilliant show. Skill, strength and athleticism. The other team are just not on the park.

Hunter to Bremner, Bremner to Giles, Giles to Clarke, Clarke to Bremner, Bremner to Madeley. I can see the futuristic walkways in the sky. Madeley passes to Giles, who floats the ball into the goalmouth like a paper dart. The wild beauty of speed, the rushing motion, opening up new routes through vast hillsides, ripping up the landscape, wiping out the past. And I feel like William Terence Fisher or Joe Lampton or Frank Machin, standing on top of a hill carved out of millstone grit, lording it over the whole world.

Reaney passes to Hunter and Hunter passes to Giles. Giles flicks up the ball and backheels it to Clarke near the halfway line. And we will build towers, towers no less. And we will rejoice in the beautiful. New buildings born of new concepts, pushing their white rectangular columns into the sky.

And this, then, is the moment. The moment when history comes rushing towards us, making us feel lightheaded. I've been barmitzvahed, I've read Torah in shul, I am a man. I'm at the top of the Kop. I have fully merged with the Elland Road noise. I belong.

Anthony will sign books with Leeds legend Peter Lorimer at WH Smith White Rose Centre, Leeds on Friday 20th August at 3 pm and on Saturday 21st August with Leeds legend Eddie Gray at Waterstones, Leeds at 10 am.

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