Boycott's Red Riding

Novels about sport are a bit like Naomi Campbell: notoriously difficult. The trick, if there is one, seems to be to take the sport out, or at least to use it as texture. The most successful for some years, artistically and commercially, must be David Peace's The Damned Utd, a reimagined secret history of Brian Clough's 44 days as manager of Leeds United in 1974.

Peace's take on the tropes of soured northern manhood, from Clough's alcoholic revenge-fuelled fantasies and paranoias to Don Revie's obsessive secrecy and compulsive planning took place at a football club, but weren't really about football. His real subject, as he has mentioned several times, is Yorkshire and the 1970s and 80s, from the Ripper murders in his Red Riding quartet to the miners strike in GB84. 

Geoffrey Boycott, like Brian Clough, was a man of that time and place; like Clough had done at Derby County, he provoked a revolution by being sacked. When Yorkshire CCC refused to offer him a new contract in the October of 1983 a winter of civil war followed, a war that concluded with Boycott's reinstatement and the departure from the Yorkshire committee of  Fred Trueman, Billy Sutcliffe and the terrifying Ronnie Burnet. The people had risen up behind Geoffrey.

It's a perfect subject for Peace's writing, and he has said that he has begun researching the story. I hope he writes it; his Boycott will have Shakespearean dimensions, and Geoffrey deserves a mythology of his own.

The Red Riding stories have been adapted for Channel 4, and The Damned Utd movie comes out this spring, with Michael Sheen as Clough. Which leads to the glorious proposition of Boycott: the movie. Sheen's a natural for Clough, but who could possibly play Geoffrey, and who could capture Frederick Sewards Trueman? All suggestions welcome.