Andrew Fifield On The Premier League: You should always be able to smell a good novel.

The Damned Utd, David Peace's account of Brian Clough's hazy, crazy 44 days in charge of Leeds United, is positively pungent - thick with the stench of frying onions, horse shit and booze, the unique odour of football matches in the days before shiny all-seater stadiums set in spirit-crushing industrial estates.

Peace's novel should be required reading for all those who profess even a passing interest in the game, and not just for the way in which it tickles our olfactory senses.

Even allowing for those moments when the author allows his imagination to take flight, this has to be the most brutally bathetic account of the realities of football management ever written - a dreary, destructive cycle of late nights in luxury hotel rooms, Machiavellian plotting in dingy corridors and paranoia which swells and throbs like a tumour in Clough's fevered brain.

Peace is also unflinching in his analysis of one of football's more curious anomalies: that a job which depends on extracting every last drop of excellence from two-dozen players, and where fortunes are decided in front of thousands of unforgiving eyes every Saturday, should be such a solitary pursuit.

Dislocated from his blood and footballing families in Derby, Clough's desperate loneliness as he seeks solace in a club and a city which despises him is almost unbearable.

Clough's escape route - and one shared by many of his managerial peers - was through the bottom of a bottle.

The grog numbed the pain, dulled the anguish of isolation and Peace is not employing artistic licence when he suggests that his subject's closest allies in that bleak Yorkshire summer were the bar-men who served him and the journalists who knew that nothing loosened Clough's tongue more effectively than a glass or three of Scotch.

It was his relief and, ultimately, his destruction.

Football has changed since the days when Derby County could win the league and Nottingham Forest the European Cup, but the solitude that tugs at a manager's soul has not. Arsene Wenger, never less than eloquent, articulated it best when he was asked to compare himself with his old sparring partner Alex Ferguson earlier this season.

"You must sacrifice your life to be such a long time in a job," he said. "You get up in the morning and drive to the training ground and you're at work but this job never leaves your head wherever you are. It's difficult to evaluate how much damage it does on your health and your environment: the only thing that is for sure is that the people around you suffer."

It is true, also, that Wenger and Ferguson would gladly choose the suffering that accompanies solitude over the misery that would come from seeing their power diluted.

Managers of their ilk - strong, bloody-minded autocrats, determined to control every aspect of their club from the first team's style of play to the time youth players must report to training - do not take kindly to being crowded.

They are, in effect, the natural heirs to men such as Clough.

They are also a dying breed. The 21st-century Premier League is full of hangers-on and nowhere is more clogged than the dugout: the dieticians and nutritionists, the sports psychologists and performance analysts, they are all there, watching from the stands or on their laptops if not barking orders from the bench.

The reliably ridiculous Newcastle United even donated a new term to English football's lexicon last week, when they appointed Dennis Wise as an "executive director (football)", the sort of laughably meaningless title usually bestowed on retired world leaders when they take up a high-wage, low-workload position with a merchant bank.

Kevin Keegan, a man schooled in the Anfield bootroom and who walked out of Newcastle just days after joining for his first spell in charge because he felt undermined at boardroom level, appeared decidedly non-plussed at the notion of working with a man whose spiteful, snarling image as a player hardly adheres to his own free-spirited philosophy.

Given Wise's brief apparently includes signing players, liaising with directors and overseeing youth development, it is fair to ask just what Keegan - by his own admission, a tactical novice who holds truck with detailed preparation - will do.

Such an appointment dents Keegan's authority and sows the seeds for future discontent.

Clough's likely response to such an arrival on his watch would hardly be fitting for the pages of a family newspaper: suffice to say it probably would have culminated in the sound of a slamming door and tinkling glass.

There are some managers who are best left alone.