The Best Left-Back in the World

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 about all week, 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.

Maybe even better. Cooper had started as a winger, and might have been even better at it than Gray, but he couldn’t take Eddie’s place in the team, or Albert Johanneson’s before him. For a long time he couldn’t take Willie Bell’s place at left-back, either. From 1964 to 1967 Cooper’s was an intermittent name on the teamsheet, sometimes popping up wearing three, sometimes eleven, and he was almost sold to Blackburn. Don Revie said later he had nightmares about what might have been if Rovers agreed to pay the £25,000 fee. From 1967/68 Cooper became first choice, at left-back, the best place to make his skills work as a left-winger. He started working in tandem with Gray, two fleet wingers, one skilful and wily, the other bursting through like a train.

It’s not surprising that, when they met at United’s centenary celebrations in 2019, Norman Hunter didn’t recognise Terry Cooper: he was looking at his face. The Terry Cooper he knew best was a blue number three on the back of a white shirt, disappearing towards the horizon with his mate, the number eleven. Norman’s joyful modesty is defined by reckoning himself just lucky to stand on halfway with a front row view of the best players in the world. When he recognised his old friend, it was through his voice, “How are you Norman?” enough to bring it all rushing back in an instant, like hearing, “Give me the ball, Norman,” or, “Pass it here, Norman,” before Terry turned and ran away.

What Billy Bremner remembered about Cooper was courage. Grit. Hard graft. Suffering. That leg break in 1972 was first diagnosed as a hairline fracture without complications, but Cooper was out for 21 months. ‘Two years of sheer, hard graft, of pain and a refusal to give in,’ wrote Bremner, in his 1974 ‘Book of Soccer’. ‘At first we used to laugh and joke with him, to jolly him along and tell him to hurry up.’ But as operation followed operation, month followed month, ‘It was a painful thing to watch him striving to regain total fitness. It was hard for us… but it was torment for him.’ He made two comeback appearances in 1973/74’s supreme title win, and started the next season under Brian Clough before playing a handful of times for Jimmy Armfield. Don Revie was now the England manager and reckoned Cooper was back to his best, picking him to play against Portugal, but he only lasted 23 minutes in that match. Cooper was now thirty years old, a metal plate and bone graft changing his legs while Revie’s departure had utterly changed Leeds. Trevor Cherry was doing what any United player would do, refusing to give up his place at left-back without a fight, whether to Cooper or Eddie Gray’s little brother Frank, just coming through. Cooper left in 1975, playing another 250 league games for Jack Charlton’s Middlesbrough, playing again with Norman Hunter for Bristol City and without him for Rovers, and for Billy Bremner’s Doncaster.

Cooper’s total appearances for Leeds were 351, while his peers Bremner, Hunter and Paul Reaney racked up more than twice as many. His was a late start and an early finish, and fine though Cherry was, who can say what three more seasons of the best attacking left-back in the world in full flight might have meant to Leeds United and England. Always, at Leeds, memories of our greatest players are shaded by regrets. But that’s why the heights players like Terry Cooper did achieve means so much to Leeds fans. So many seemed to have it easy, but we remember what it cost our lads. ◉