Fitting final tribute - Chick Young

By Chick Young BBC Scotland football correspondent

We shouldn't let the misty eyes cloud the issue. He wasn't called the Moody Blue for nothing.

Davie Cooper's worst injuries were usually huffs. And that can be a serious problem for a player.

Mainly, he was out of sorts when the favourite he had backed in the 2.30 at Hamilton didn't perform. The worry for his managers was that Coop would follow suit.

But, for all that, you couldn't help falling in love with him. And if you didn't drool over his ability then it was probably because there was a vision fault in your green-tinted glasses.

I'll tell you how good a footballer Davie Cooper was. He's up there with Law and Baxter, Johnstone and Dalglish - and my boyhood hero, John White.

Davie Cooper won many honours in 12 years with Rangers

His only problem, except that he didn't see it as a problem at all, was that the elastic band that tied him to the West of Scotland in general, and Hamilton in particular, wouldn't break.

He was a home-loving boy who wouldn't have bothered buying a passport if his club and country hadn't needed him to come fly with them.

I first saw him play for a wonderful Clydebank side in the mid-seventies, an awesome natural talent with a left foot that could hypnotise and then strike like a cobra.

Kilbowie Park was the unlikely setting for a sell-out crowd, but I remember Christmas Day 1977 and a lock-out for a table-top game against St Mirren.

There were 10,000 of us sardined inside the ground, thousands more outside listening in like it was radio without the commentary.

Coop didn't like the press - didn't like the attention at all actually.

But I got chatting to him in a civic reception held for the team in Clydebank Town Hall, where plainly he would rather have been anywhere else in the world. Preferrably, though, somewhere with jockeys, horses and a bookmaker.

He was a good-looking bugger you know. He could have been another George Best. He could have blazed a trail for Beckham.

But high-flying wasn't Davie's style. In these days, he couldn't even drive and wasn't interested in learning. He travelled to Clydebank from Hamilton by rail, which seemed to me the equivalent of a voyage on the Orient Express.

Then Rangers came calling. Big Jock Wallace paid £100,000 after Coop ripped the knitting out of his team in a League Cup tie.

Clubs in England wanted him, but how the hell was he supposed to get home to Hamilton every night from, say, Birmingham. And there was also the small point about him being a Bluenose.

Cooper was fantastic for Rangers - as entertaining in his own way as his namesake, Tommy. And much more magical.

I remember Graeme Souness telling me that he couldn't believe how good he was when he inherited him as manager at Rangers. "If I wasn't so selfish, I would be telling the big clubs in Italy about him," he confessed. "But why would I hunt a talent like that out the door?"

Davie Cooper helped Motherwell to Scottish Cup victory in 1991

In the end, Coop did go, of course - way before his sell-by date, to the eternal gratitude of Motherwell, with whom he won another Scottish Cup medal and who were easy favourites to sign him given Fir Park's proximity to Hamilton and the race course.

By now, Davie had come out of his shell with the media. And he had learned to drive.

The metamorphis happened mostly at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, or more exactly in the two weeks altitude training at Santa Fe in New Mexico and Los Angeles.

I talked a lot with Davie on that trip and I saw him discover that there is a big world beyond the M74.

And that's the tragedy. His post-football life was just coming into full bloom when he died. He had mellowed. His outlook had changed. He was purring with happiness.

I cried when I heard. Not that I was alone. I liked Davie a lot as a friend. As a player, I adored him.

Ten years later, I can close my eyes and remember that left foot, that body strength that opposing defenders never realised was in his artiliery. That venomous strike. That dribbling wizardry.

Death is seldom anything else, of course, but this was particulary cruel.

But I wonder what he makes of it all 10 years on. His old clubs meeting in a cup final. The Coop final. Lovely.

Even Davie might be smiling as he looks down from his Moody Blue Heaven.