Daniel Chapman har også oppsummert bra hva som skrives og sies om Peter i disse dager:
I'm sure by now you know that Peter Lorimer, Leeds United's youngest ever player and greatest ever goalscorer, has died.
The formal announcement from Leeds United is here, and the official site also has a photo gallery and a video of his highlights — many balls being smacked into many goals, as you can imagine — but actually, better than you can imagine until you've actually watched him doing it.
LUFC have also reproduced Don Revie's tribute from Peter Lorimer's testimonial programme back in 1977:
It's well known that we stopped him shooting at full power at our goalkeepers in training so as not to risk injury. With Peter the power is generated by follow-through. Goalkeepers and defenders can never really spot a shot on its way because there is so little backlift. It’s a special skill we never coached into him- he had it all the time.
Anything Peter connected with inside the box was inevitably a goal. His accuracy and power was such that it often looked as if he had hit shots too close to the keeper. But he knew there was no chance of stopping it.
And they have a full version of Eddie Gray's comments, that he gave to many people in many forms on Saturday, as has been his sad duty too often lately:
“As well as being a great player and a great goal scorer, he was a great lad, he was my roommate for 12 years, travelling all over Europe and up and down the country together.
“Today you hear managers say they’re not going to be in the market for a £50-60m player, but you would need a lot more money than that to get a player like Peter.
The YEP have a round up of other tributes here, and Graham Smyth has written an obituary, starting at the start:
Legend has it he broke a goalkeeper's fingers with a 20-yard free-kick as a schoolboy, playing for Stobswell against Linlathen at Caird Park.
At The Athletic, Phil Hay tracked down some of the goalkeepers who used to stand and wait and hope that Lorimer wasn't going to shoot at them that day — a forlorn hope, because of course he was:
Bob Wilson spent a few minutes at lunchtime yesterday watching a montage of Peter Lorimer’s goals on BBC One’s Football Focus show.
It was only as the power and the glory of the goals got more ridiculous that he felt the old twinge of panic again.
“God help you,” Wilson says. “As a goalkeeper, you weren’t ever safe from him.”
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“We had Bertie Mee and Don Howe (as manager and No 2) at Arsenal and they would say before every game against Leeds, ‘Remember to watch Lorimer’. I didn’t need reminding. I’d be thinking about him before they said anything. I hated the sight of Peter, in the nicest possible sense, because any time he appeared with the ball, even 30 yards out, you worried that he’d smash it. I reacted differently to him than I did to most other forwards. Most players coming up with the ball that far out weren’t a problem. His power was terrifying.
“What’s more incredible again is that the balls back then were thick leather; heavy when it was dry and worse again when it was wet. Common sense tells you he shouldn’t have been able to hit it as hard as he did. I was watching his goals on Football Focus earlier and as they came one after another, I was a bit speechless. You forget as time goes on but then you see them again. All I could think about was what it was like being in the firing line."
Here at TSB, I — this is Moscow here — looked at those shots from a different angle, marvelling at the sheer confidence of Lorimer turning down a pass to Allan Clarke, or Eddie Gray, of Johnny Giles, or any of them, because he could just shoot the ball into the net himself:
Games of football are supposed to take ninety minutes but Lorimer had the talent and the confidence to make most of that time irrelevant. He could thrill crowds with his ninety miles an hour goals while the best footballers of a generation stood and watched him, waiting for the restart so they could have a kick too.
The stereotype of individuals in football teams is of the dribblers, the tricksters, the playmakers. But the individual in Revie’s Leeds was Lorimer. There were dribblers who you had to stop and watch do their thing. With Lorimer you had to stop and watch him celebrate. His thing was forcing the referee to blow his whistle and stop the match, because the ball had gone in the net and nobody knew how until they heard the sonic boom following its flight.
In the Guardian, Peter Mason's obituary starts in Broughty Ferry, and the attention Leeds United were giving Lorimer as a boy:
So clear was his talent at Stobswell boys’ school that by 12 he was attracting the attention of the biggest clubs in Britain. Second Division Leeds showed a particular interest, and their chief scout, John Quinn, visited the Lorimer household each weekend with a fiver for the father’s drinking fund, 10 shillings for the boy himself, and a dozen eggs to help fill out his skinny frame.
Then Louise Taylor takes up the story, about how Manchester United thought they would seal their deal:
Had it not been for his parents’ lack of avarice the 15-year-old Lorimer might well have joined a rather more established powerhouse team. Word had spread that a youngster known variously as “Thunderboots”, “Hot Shot” and “Lash” had dynamite in his feet and scouts jostled for his services. One day, a briefcase embossed with Manchester United’s crest and containing £5,000 in used bank notes was left at the Lorimer family home. It was most definitely not the sort of thing which usually happened in Broughty Ferry, a suburb of Dundee on the north bank of the Firth of Tay.
In 1962, £5,000 represented a lot of money but competition for a player who would unleash 90mph-plus shots and once dispatched a 107mph penalty proved intense. “About 30 clubs wanted me,” Lorimer said. “But my parents had seen something in Don Revie that convinced them he was the manager for me.”
The Leeds manager’s decision to visit Broughty Ferry left such an impression that the briefcase was discreetly returned to Manchester with a polite note declining the offer. “My parents deserved a lot of credit,” said Lorimer. “Manchester United were the power team at the time but they saw Revie had a plan and was trying to build something.”
Mentioned in some of the other articles is how Revie, hearing about the money from Old Trafford, had to talk his way out of a speeding ticket so he could make the last ferry of the night taking him to the Lorimers' home; the paperwork was signed in their kitchen at 2.30am.
The Telegraph's obituary describes that childhood home:
The Lorimers lived in Broughty Ferry, the part of the city once favoured by its jute barons. Their two-room dwelling was next to the cinema, however, and the boys could not get to sleep until the noise of the soundtrack coming through the walls ended for the night.
And Lorimer the player:
If Johnny Giles was the side’s brains, Norman Hunter its heart and Billy Bremner its elbows, knees and toecaps, Lorimer represented its animating spirit. While condoning the cynical physicality that led the club to be tagged “Dirty Leeds”, he also shone with sublime skill, and above all with loyalty
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“Ninety miles an hour!” the fans would chant at Elland Road as Lorimer smashed in another goal from distance. When measured using a machine that tested bullets his shot registered at 107 mph.
In the Mail on Sunday, Richard Gibson says in later years Lorimer wanted the fans to sing some new songs:
He spoke of his sadness hearing new young Leeds supporters forlornly chanting the names of the stars of the Revie team. “It’s the same songs that were being chanted in our day. It’s hard for me to see that and that’s why I want us back to where we were. That’s why I still go to the matches. I have the passion for the club.”
In The Telegraph, Jim White describes Lorimer's playing style, laid back in years when the game was frantic and physical:
In a time of brutal engagement, when violence was an almost inevitable part of the game, he appeared to float above the melee: calm, rational, wholly undisturbed. Indeed, so relaxed was he, a steward was often required to be dispatched just before kick off at home games and bring him to the dressing room from his favoured position, watching the racing on a stadium television.
That laid back attitude,as noted in The Times, led to some disagreements with Revie:
Revie’s obsessive characteristics did, thought Lorimer, sometimes go too far. “Don never let you out of his sight, checking with the landladies what time you got to bed as apprentices, posting spies in the pubs.” And on match days the calmer, more reticent Lorimer had to keep his distance from a dressing room full of neurotically superstitious players, led by Revie wearing his “lucky mohair suit with the arse falling out of the trousers, walking twice round his lucky lamppost, a final comb of the hair in the mirror”.
“I was a bit more relaxed about my football than others,” recalled Lorimer. “Playing was something I loved but if I lost I didn’t take it out on the family.”
But what about that shot. Back at The Telegraph, Johnny Giles talks about when he first saw Lorimer's right foot in action, revealing just how close he was to making it a weapon of Old Trafford's:
Johnny Giles can still vividly recall the first time he saw Peter Lorimer. Giles was circling Manchester United’s Cliff training ground with team-mates who included Sir Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and Nobby Stiles when their attention was deflected by a young triallist.
“He was on the edge of the penalty area whacking balls into the back of the net and we all sort of paused and said, ‘What a strike’,” says Giles. “It was Peter. He 15 and already had that shot. It was a natural gift to be able to strike the ball like he did.”
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“He was the only player I would encourage to take a shot from 40 yards,” says Giles. “Most others you would be thinking, ‘What’s he doing? You’re not shooting from there.’ With him I would be, ‘Go on Peter’ and he would score from that distance. His shot was unbelievable but I still don’t think he was given the credit he deserves as an all-round player.
Giles also talks about the past year at Leeds, the bad times and the good:
It has been a particularly traumatic year for this most iconic of Leeds teams. The loss of Lorimer has followed Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Trevor Cherry since last April. “It’s been awful - a very sad time - we’re obviously all getting older,” says Giles, who turned 80 last November, and stresses the wider context of their achievements. “Don started with a second division team that were struggling and he left a team that had won the league in his last season.
“That’s how you judge a manager. What does he take over and what does he leave? It’s the same now. He [Marcelo Bielsa] hasn’t spent a lot of money. What he has done basically has been great and they are never dull to watch.
“The only thing I would criticise is the marking up and the pulling and pushing when they’ve got free-kicks and corners against them.
“There’s no magic wand. We had great players and a great manager. Great players are not those who are good on their day. They put the same effort into every match they play. And Peter was a great player.”
And Giles' criticism of marking from corners is as near to modern as we'll go, today. I was thinking earlier how a strange aspect of losing our great players during lockdowns is that there's no closure, no public funerals where last tributes can be paid, nothing to stop the relentless drive of contemporary events, like a Lorimer shot straight through any chances of contemplation. So with a quiet few days likely, ahead of the international fixtures beginning on Wednesday, I'll save reaction to the Fulham game until tomorrow.
