Davie Cooper didn’t play for my team, but still, he was just about my favourite player of the eighties. As a teenager, I never missed a Scotland game at Hampden and Cooper – Super Cooper, if you were a Daily Record sub-editor – was an ever-present in those teams; teams carved from squads of Scottish football legends – Miller! McLeish! Souness! Dalglish! – who, through a mixture of elan and class and stubborn Scottish grit regularly progressed to World Cups.
Among his peers, Copper dazzled. ‘Give Davie the ball‘ might’ve been the only instruction the team needed before kick-off. He was, to quote Ray Wilkins, ‘a Brazilian trapped in a Scotsman’s body,’ and Cooper could, and usually did, waltz past half the opposition, inside of them, outside of them, the ball tied to his Adidas with invisible elastic. With a dip of the shoulder and the sudden bend of a well-tanned leg, he’d turn a defender back to front and upside down, get himself to the byline, look up through the fringe of an outgrown and collapsing 1950s-style quiff and stand a ball to the back post for a Charlie Nicholas or a Maurice Johnston to do the inevitable.
Cooper had a swagger. He wasn’t like the players of today, those identikit, finitely-coached superhumans whose performances are tracked by data and details and tweaked like robots accordingly. Davie played on pure instinct, a street player, a tanner ba’ player as they love to say up here, a gallusly swashbuckling left winger with a devastating left foot to match. He could thread the ball between the narrowest of international defences. He could bend it as sweepingly as the corrugated roof that covered the West Terracing behind the Hampden goal. He could crack a shot as accurately and deadly as the most highly-trained of marksmen. So, yeah. Davie never played for my team, but he played for my country and the thrill of seeing him in the starting line-up was always a rush. They’re very different players, but I’ll wager there are wee guys today who, on seeing Scott McTominay’s name in the starting line-up, feel exactly the same way. (I know I do.)
Here’s a thing:
Davie Cooper once dribbled past me.
I can still replay it in my head – it’s playing right now as I type this – and I was certain I could date the time and place with all the accuracy and confidence of a Cooper cross, but as it turns out, I maybe can’t.
As I remember it, we’re walking down Irvine High Street, my friends and I. It’s a Friday lunchtime in late May and we’re in 6th year at school, a month away from leaving school behind forever. Being senior pupils, we’re trusted to make our own way, unaccompanied by anyone from the school, to the Magnum each Friday afternoon to take part in a selection of sports activities that the school has booked for us. There’s squash and badminton, 5-a-sides, of course, table tennis and swimming (and the flumes). Sometimes, we’ll just go and have a Slush Puppy and sit in the viewing gallery, feet up against the glass, being harmless but loud and annoying to tutting members of the public. We all look forward to these teacher-free afternoons; the perfect sharpener for the anticipation of the weekend just ahead.
Unlike in more recent years, this day in May sees the High Street properly bustling. The shops are full and varied, the pavements crowded with Irvinites going about their business. It’s a sunny, late spring day and there’s a thrum of activity and good living just above the noise of the blue buses that belch past with regularity. We’ve just passed the Kings Arms, with its top-floor wonderland ‘The Attic’ yet to be discovered, when from out of the Ladbrokes bookies next door pours half the Motherwell football team, shellsuited in claret and amber and availed of their weekly wages that they’ve no doubt staked on themselves winning the Scottish Cup Final that they’ll contest the next day against Dundee United at Hampden Park. Being an upwardly mobile New Town, Irvine has a fancy hotel – the Skean Dhu – and it is here that the football teams who are playing at Hampden (the ‘Well, the Russian national team) and the bands who play the Magnum (Thin Lizzy, Spandau Ballet) will bunk down on pure white sheets of Egyptian cotton before or after the event.
Davie Cooper is among the group of Motherwell players and as they weave their way between Irvine’s shoppers, my hero and I find ourselves walking towards one another. I go to my right to let him pass. Davie goes to his left…which is my right… and we’re left in that awkward stand-off that we’ve all been in. I go to my left. Davie goes to his right…which is my left, and we’re at stalemate again. Without a second thought, Cooper dips a shoulder, fakes left but goes right, brushing past my hips and schoolbag as he does so and suddenly he’s past me. I say loudly and excitedly to Davie Davies, “Davie Cooper’s just dribbled past me!” and as we turn to see the back of him, Cooper looks back and, hearing what I’ve said to my pal, gives me a wee wink. What a thrill!
I hope Cooper was as brave with the bookie as he was with one of his many mazy runs. Motherwell would go on to win the Cup the next day, winning 4-3 in extra time, Ladbrokes’ loss the Motherwell squad’s gain.
Good wee story that.
My only issue with it is that I left school in June 1987. Motherwell didn’t win the Scottish Cup until four years later, in May 1991. Davie Cooper definitely dribbled past me in his full Motherwell training kit. That much is true. And I definitely made the remark to Davie Davis. Yet, here I am in 2026 baffled by it all.
Davie Cooper. Like the roots of this story, a true natural mystic.
Bob Marley – Natural Mystic
There were a couple of Davie Copper-related things posted online this past week and without – quite clearly – scanning the articles, I made the assumption that the anniversary of Davie’s death was this weekend. In reality, next Saturday (23rd March) will see the 31st anniversary of his passing. So not only is this post probably a week too early, it has me thinking back to that day in 1987 – no! – 1991! – when – as a schoolboy, or definitely maybe not – he swept past me as if I were an Eastern European right back defending the six yard box at Hampden Park. Does anyone else have a memory as warped and buckled as mine?
Plain Or Pan 