The Best Left-Back in the World
Leeds fans believed they had the best team, but in most areas of the pitch they'd concede individual supremacy was up for debate. Bobby Moore was a worthy rival to Norman Hunter. Pele might, they'd grudgingly admit, improve the side. But who was close to being a better left-back than Cooper?
High among the should have beens, could have beens and might have beens of Don Revie's Super Leeds, and the club's history in total, comes Terry Cooper, breaking his leg at Stoke in April 1972.
Leeds were cruising to a 3-0 win with only minutes left when Cooper collided with John Marsh. TC was stretchered away, but nobody realised it was serious until he was x-rayed in a local hospital. Leeds set off for home, leaving Stoke's manager Tony Waddington to ring Don Revie's wife, Elsie, so the news was waiting when he got in. "What a tragedy this is," Waddington told the papers. "I feel utterly sick about it. After all, what did it matter? The ball was out on the touchline, there were only a few minutes to go."
At the time Leeds were on their way to winning the FA Cup final, the trophy they wanted most after cruel disappointments against Liverpool in 1965, Chelsea and Everton in semi-finals in 1967 and '68, Chelsea again in the final in 1970. Beating Arsenal in the centenary cup final in 1972 completed the domestic clean sweep that started when Cooper volleyed in the winner at Wembley, a goal he'd dreamed all week was coming, to win the League Cup over Arsenal in 1968 and lift the creeping anxiety from Revie's young team. He watched the others win the FA Cup with his leg in plaster.
Terry Cooper was the best left-back in the world, and it wasn't only Yorkshire bias that said so. Leeds fans believed they had the best team, but in most areas of the pitch they'd concede individual supremacy was up for debate. Bobby Moore was a worthy rival to Norman Hunter. Pele might, they'd grudgingly admit, improve the side. But who was close to being a better left-back than Cooper?
The FA Cup final replay in 1970 showed what he was all about. Eddie Gray tormented Chelsea's David Webb in the first game at Wembley, and Ron 'Chopper' Harris has long boasted about the way he sorted that out in the replay at Old Trafford. He swapped with Webb at right-back and, he claims, put Gray out of the game in the first five minutes. It isn't true: it was almost half-time before he got close enough to Gray to hobble him with a kick across the back of his knees, the only hope Chelsea had of stopping him. And it isn't true that it was the game-changing moment Harris wanted it to be. Gray, United's left-winger, was arguably better suited to playing centrally anyway; he certainly had the brain for it. With his movement restricted, he played inside in the second half, while United's other left-winger, Top Cat Cooper, bombed past him down the touchline towards Harris. This was Leeds in all their majesty: kick one down, and another would appear, just as good.