David Hopkin ⭑ From A-Z since '92
History was heavy on David Hopkin. When George Graham made him captain, he was following Collins, Bremner, Strachan and McAllister. The two trophy-winners among them were also notoriously flame-haired, which perhaps inspired Hopkin's decision to stand apart by bleaching his hair white.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
David Hopkin came late to professional football and left early, and made as much of his ability as he was allowed to in the meantime. He could have done more, but had the same problem as many hard-working all-rounders who brought real-world realism into the gilded cages where others had grown up only knowing the game. Hopkin had so much to offer in so many different ways he was often taken for granted.
Hopkin grew up in Port Glasgow and went down the road to join Greenock Morton when he was nineteen, combining football with working in a pub called the Roadhouse. "It was a nice life in a way," he said, "because I had two wages, I enjoyed the pub job and I was playing football." Seven years hadn't changed him much when, the night after he'd scored the winner for Crystal Palace in the play-off final at Wembley, he took his wife out for dinner and got chatting to a barman.
"The guy who served me had been at Wembley. He was a Palace fanatic and was saying, 'The lad Hopkins had scored a great goal'. I didn't say anything to him. I just didn't need the attention. Some people love the limelight but I just treat football as a job that I love being involved in."
Quite how the barman didn't recognise Palace's captain and matchwinner is another matter. Years later Hopkin said he still laughs at the footage. "When I took my shirt off to celebrate I showed I'm a typical Scot who goes blue in the sun. Milk bottle white doesn't cover me when the shirt's off but I didn't care." Dave Bassett once said he, "looked like the mad Scotsman who would come down to beat England by himself."
He was tall, had tufts of bright, straight ginger hair, and he played without his front teeth. He joined Chelsea from Greenock Morton in 1992 and although he didn't play much, he stood out when he did, once getting involved against Leeds when John Pemberton and Mark Stein started trading punches and getting a booking because he was so easy for the referee to spot.
Hopkin moved from Scotland after fewer than fifty games for Greenock Morton, when he'd just turned 22, and before anyone had worked out what sort of midfielder he was. Ian Porterfield, who signed him for Chelsea for £300,000, reckoned he was, "A big lad who normally plays wide, he has tremendous pace — and also a terrific throw. It's real Vinnie Jones stuff. A throw-in will be as good as a corner to us when David starts taking them." But Porterfield also reckoned, "He's also a lad who can play through the middle. We are well pleased with him, and you mark my words, he's going to become a real name in 1993."
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