Peter Lorimer RIP

[Barlow Boy]

Lovely story that ANS.

I got Fanthology for Christmas, I’ll be getting stuck into that in the summer

[johnh]

Lovely story that ANS.

I got Fanthology for Christmas, I’ll be getting stuck into that in the summer

Yes I agree, lovely story ANS. John Charles as well. My number 1 footballer of all time.

[Another Northern Soul]

Lovely story that ANS.

I got Fanthology for Christmas, I’ll be getting stuck into that in the summer

Thanks BB.

It's very dated is the book now but some of the contents I hope still work

[Another Northern Soul]

Lovely story that ANS.

I got Fanthology for Christmas, I’ll be getting stuck into that in the summer

Yes I agree, lovely story ANS. John Charles as well. My number 1 footballer of all time.

Thanks John.

Former Leeds junior player Bobby Shields was usually in Peter's pub whenever I visited. He knew/remembered my dad from ER as well which made things a bit easier. He was of course close to JC as well and I think he was one of the coffin bearers at John C's funeral. Bobby will be absolutely devastated with Peter's death.

[Saxon]

I was privileged to have watched Peter for the early part of his career up to 1972.
Of the many goals, triumphs, and disappointments Peter and the club experienced, one incident I can recall as clearly as yesterday showed Peter's courage, resilience, and fighting spirit.
It was some time after he had already made his first team debut at 15 years and some days.
The game was a leeds Junior team cup game at Elland Road, I'm pretty sure it was against either Newcastle or Sunderland juniors.
A mid week night game, maybe 1000 people there. I went with a couple of other boys from our street. We might have climbed in, I knew 4 or 5 ways to get in.Only the west stand and the scratching shed were open. We climbed over the fence onto the lowfields, and down to the kop. Ended sitting behind the goal on the wall feet dangling onto the field, we were the only 3 people on the kop. Well into the game Peter is chasing a long downfield ball coming right at us, goalkeeper comes off his line, there is a collision, and I swear to this day I hear a loud 'crack' like a snapping branch. Peter doesn't get up he's in serious trouble, goalkeeper waves immediately to the benches and out runs Revie and Cocker. My friends and myself are on the field by this time but told"get lost " by some official, Peter is stretchered off, broken leg.
Peter made a complete recovery and the rest is history. But when I talk about his resilience and fighting spirit, imagine you're a 16 year old boy, hundreds of miles from home and your family, badly injured and you don't know if your career is over, that's when your character shows through, how you handle it, and don't let it beat you, and that's what Peter did with credit.
RIP Peter.

[Another Northern Soul]

I was privileged to have watched Peter for the early part of his career up to 1972.
Of the many goals, triumphs, and disappointments Peter and the club experienced, one incident I can recall as clearly as yesterday showed Peter's courage, resilience, and fighting spirit.
It was some time after he had already made his first team debut at 15 years and some days.
The game was a leeds Junior team cup game at Elland Road, I'm pretty sure it was against either Newcastle or Sunderland juniors.
A mid week night game, maybe 1000 people there. I went with a couple of other boys from our street. We might have climbed in, I knew 4 or 5 ways to get in.Only the west stand and the scratching shed were open. We climbed over the fence onto the lowfields, and down to the kop. Ended sitting behind the goal on the wall feet dangling onto the field, we were the only 3 people on the kop. Well into the game Peter is chasing a long downfield ball coming right at us, goalkeeper comes off his line, there is a collision, and I swear to this day I hear a loud 'crack' like a snapping branch. Peter doesn't get up he's in serious trouble, goalkeeper waves immediately to the benches and out runs Revie and Cocker. My friends and myself are on the field by this time but told"get lost " by some official, Peter is stretchered off, broken leg.
Peter made a complete recovery and the rest is history. But when I talk about his resilience and fighting spirit, imagine you're a 16 year old boy, hundreds of miles from home and your family, badly injured and you don't know if your career is over, that's when your character shows through, how you handle it, and don't let it beat you, and that's what Peter did with credit.
RIP Peter.

Great story, thank you. Definitely heard a leg-break myself while playing - a teammate fractured the tibia bone and yes, it sounded just like a small twig which does not seem proportionately correct! I broke my own tibia in one game and there was no sound at all but my giddy aunt the pain is something I'll never forget!

[Barlow Boy]

I was privileged to have watched Peter for the early part of his career up to 1972.
Of the many goals, triumphs, and disappointments Peter and the club experienced, one incident I can recall as clearly as yesterday showed Peter's courage, resilience, and fighting spirit.
It was some time after he had already made his first team debut at 15 years and some days.
The game was a leeds Junior team cup game at Elland Road, I'm pretty sure it was against either Newcastle or Sunderland juniors.
A mid week night game, maybe 1000 people there. I went with a couple of other boys from our street. We might have climbed in, I knew 4 or 5 ways to get in.Only the west stand and the scratching shed were open. We climbed over the fence onto the lowfields, and down to the kop. Ended sitting behind the goal on the wall feet dangling onto the field, we were the only 3 people on the kop. Well into the game Peter is chasing a long downfield ball coming right at us, goalkeeper comes off his line, there is a collision, and I swear to this day I hear a loud 'crack' like a snapping branch. Peter doesn't get up he's in serious trouble, goalkeeper waves immediately to the benches and out runs Revie and Cocker. My friends and myself are on the field by this time but told"get lost " by some official, Peter is stretchered off, broken leg.
Peter made a complete recovery and the rest is history. But when I talk about his resilience and fighting spirit, imagine you're a 16 year old boy, hundreds of miles from home and your family, badly injured and you don't know if your career is over, that's when your character shows through, how you handle it, and don't let it beat you, and that's what Peter did with credit.
RIP Peter.

Great story that Saxon

[SCOTTISH LEEDS]

From the Dundee Courier:-

Peter Lorimer kept a secret from his Leeds United team-mates after joining the Elland Road ranks as a Dundee schoolboy back in 1962.

Lorimer, who died aged 74 on Saturday, was a distant relation of Leeds manager Don Revie’s wife Elsie who was born in Lochgelly.

Elsie was the niece of former Raith Rovers player Johnny Duncan and attended school in Cowdenbeath.

Keeping it in the family

Lorimer said he did not let it be known because he “did not want accusations flying that my joining Leeds was a question of keeping it in the family”.

The former Eastern and Grove pupil would instead make it on merit alone and went on to make over 700 appearances and score a record 238 goals for Leeds.

Speaking in his 2005 autobiography, Lorimer said: “There were traces of football history in my father’s family but the strength of my lineage is on my mother’s side.

“She was a member of the Duncan family, which was closely related to that of Mrs Elsie Revie, and the Duncans produced quite a few professional footballers.

“Few people were aware, and I did not let it be known, that I was distantly related to Mrs Revie.”

Lorimer signed for Leeds at the age of 15 after once scoring 176 goals in one season while playing for his school team and Broughty YMCA.

Writing in Lorimer’s testimonial programme in 1978, Revie recalled the mad dash north to catch the final ferry across the Forth to make it to Dundee to sign Lorimer.
Tribute from Don Revie in 1978

Revie said: “In the early sixties – when Leeds were still, remember, a Second Division club – we pulled off a couple of signings that were to prove of inestimable value to the club.

“First – after Maurice Lindley had run the rule over the boy himself – we signed Eddie Gray.

“Maurice couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw for himself.

“Then there was a youngster who had scored an astonishing 176 goals in a season for his school and local YMCA teams.

“Another of our Scottish scouts, Johnny Quinn, spotted him playing in Dundee and saw his potential even though the boy in question was so frail he would have made Allan Clarke look like Tarzan.

“The youngster’s name was Peter Lorimer and even then he packed a terrific shot and possessed that unique, uncoachable knack of scoring goals.

“Peter played for Scotland at Hampden in a schoolboy international – watched by us again – and the next day I had a call from Johnny to say that another club was all set to sign him (we later discovered 28 league clubs were after him).

“So Maurice Lindley and I climbed into my car and set off for Scotland, leaving Leeds about eight o’clock that Sunday night.

“We just managed to squeeze on the ferry – and looking back, I’m glad we did.

“In fact, we were the last car on – at the other side we set off again and I was stopped for speeding as we hurtled through Perth in the middle of the night.

“Fortunately that policeman was a football fan!

“We arrived at Peter’s house at two in the morning, knocked up the whole house and signed him.

“At eight o’clock the other club arrived only to find us having a cup of tea and Peter Lorimer a Leeds player by some hours!”

An injury crisis prompted Lorimer’s debut aged 15 in September 1962 but it would be two-and-a-half years until his next league game under Revie.

It was in 1965-66 that he established himself as a mainstay of the side and during his time at Elland Road he won two First Division titles, FA and League Cup wins, two Inter-Cities’ Fairs Cups and the Charity Shield.

“I soon lost count of the number of goals he rammed in with that incredibly accurate right foot,” said Revie.

“It’s well known that we stopped him shooting at full power at our goalkeepers in training so as not to risk injury.

“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.

“Peter terrorised so many teams in Europe and that was our secret weapon.

“They’d just never seen anything like him.

“And with Scotland he travelled even further afield to show the world his talent.”

Lorimer won 21 caps for Scotland, scoring four goals and played every game at the 1974 World Cup finals in West Germany.

Lorimer produced the impossible

Revie said every member of the Leeds team that challenged for all the game’s top honours at home and in Europe had a role to play.

“Peter’s was more noticeable, perhaps, because he played up front,” he said.

“He produced the impossible so often it was almost commonplace.

“Like the killer goal area instincts of Allan Clarke, the exhilaration and inspiring leadership of Billy Bremner, the cool, sophisticated brilliance of John Giles, the shuddering tackling ability of Norman Hunter, Peter’s stunning shooting was priceless.”

Lorimer left Leeds in 1979 for spells with Toronto Blizzard and Vancouver Whitecaps in the North American Soccer League (NASL).

He returned to England with York City and then in 1983 arrived back at Elland Road to make a further 87 appearances and add 19 goals to his Leeds tally.

Short spells at Hapoel Haifa and at Whitby Town under former Leeds and Scotland team-mate David Harvey brought his playing career to a close in 1986.

Don Revie had also decided to retire that same year.

Lorimer’s former manager moved back to Scotland to Kinross with Elsie following a brief stint with Egyptian Premier League club Al-Ahly of Cairo.

Revie was then diagnosed as suffering from incurable motor neurone disease in 1987 and died at the age of 61 in 1989 in Murrayfield Hospital in Edinburgh.

Elsie was president of the Leeds United Supporters Club following her husband’s death.

She died in 2005 at the age of 77.

Former Courier editor had a front row seat

Adrian Arthur, the former editor of The Courier, was in the Lorimer household as the 15-year-old schoolboy put pen to paper.

He said: “In the early 1960s, I was working as a sub-editor for The Courier in the Bank Street offices.

“This particular night, I was the ‘late sub’, which meant I stayed on after everyone else had gone home to collate any late news which might materialise.

“Just after 2am, the doorman phoned, stating: ‘There’s a gentleman at the door, and he would like to speak to you’.

“It turned out to be Peter Lorimer’s brother, who told me that Leeds manager Don Revie was in the family home in Douglas, and would we like the story and a photo opportunity.

“Along with another colleague, John McQuilkan, we made our way to Douglas and, with duty photographer Bob Allan also in attendance, we witnessed the signing.

“Although The Courier were able to use some of the copy the same morning, the photo appeared in the Evening Telegraph later in the day.”

[Starman4291]

Believing in Peter Lorimer
Hotshot
Written by Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman Artwork by Eamonn DaltonMarch 21, 2021

Imagine having the confidence.

You’ve the ball at your feet, you’re thirty yards from goal. Ahead of you is Mick Jones, who will win any ball in the penalty area. Near him is Allan Clarke, ready for a through ball. Paul Reaney is overlapping on your right. Eddie Gray is on the left wing, waiting for a switch of play, Terry Cooper backing him up. John Giles and Billy Bremner are zipping around you, in and out of pockets of space.

Imagine having the confidence. The confidence to think, sod all them. To think, they’re good players, but so what? I’ve got the ball. And I’m shooting here. I’m shooting from thirty yards, blasting the ball at goal, from thirty yards out, at ninety miles an hour, past all of them in less than three-quarters of a second. I’m cutting seven of the best footballers in the world out of this game, not giving them a touch. I’m making it about me, my foot, my shot, my goal.
Only one word for that post
If it goes in. If you miss, there’ll be hell to pay. Sniffer always scores, why didn’t you give the ball to him? Or Giles, with the better angle, or Eddie, who could dribble around that full-back all day? Seven outrageously gifted individuals are ready to develop the play, move closer to goal, build a chance, make the other team bend to their collective will.

But your will is stronger. You’re Peter Lorimer, and you won’t miss. Top corner, back of the net, arms in the air, now they can thank you, seven of the best players in the world can salute your power, and Jack and Norman and Gary too. 238 times, plus one that Franz Beckenbauer had ruled out. But only afterwards. There was nothing he could do while the ball was at your feet.

Football is a team game but goals are an individual’s business. We’ve all had that sinking feeling when the Goal of the Month competition highlights a ‘team goal’. Ugh. Look at the finish, a feeble tap-in among a gallery of netstretchers. There is a time and place to appreciate the build up. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of blinking, missing the real-time thunder, and waiting excited for the replay. What just happened? We have to go back through time and slow the tape down to find out. Now, that is a good goal.

Those were the goals that made Peter Lorimer so famous and so loved, but only a fraction of them were filmed and replayed. People watched Lorimer without a safety net. How could you dare look away when he had the ball? How could you follow its path when he shot?

He did also cross. But his crosses were like his shots, designed to become goals as quickly as possible. Powerful passes to Jones or Clarke, but only if they were ready to apply the finishing touch. It would be fascinating to be able to add the number of his assists to his record, but perhaps the numbers would become overwhelming. It’s enough that he’s Leeds United’s record goalscorer, and he didn’t even play up front.

All those goals, from midfield or the wing, when United had Jones and Clarke in attack, were sheer belligerence. Clarke scored 151 goals for Leeds, but how many might he have had if Lorimer didn’t have such a powerful, accurate shot, had a penchant for through balls instead? We describe Lorimer’s shooting accurately when we say it was devastating. He was stopping the game, putting the ball beyond the other players, creating by destroying.

Before his talent took him to the level where the goalposts came with nets, young Lorimer must have ruined so many kickabouts on the recreation grounds of Broughty Ferry. A quick game after school, everyone anxious for a touch, running and laughing and trying to show their skills. Then comes Peter, and it’s a cartoon wallop and the ball is gone and everyone has to stop. Is he going to run and get it back? Well, why should he? Blame the ‘keeper who didn’t stop the shot, not the wonderkid who scored the goal.

Football in the modern era was moved towards the playground idyll by Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, who didn’t so much kick the ball as caress it, placing it gently into the goal like a baby in its basket. Pep would have had to sell Lorimer. ‘A hat-trick of thirty yarders, Peter, yes, but why won’t you give the ball to Lionel Messi?’ Hmm. For what purpose?

Leeds United needed him: winning trophies was hard, and a player who could take all the strain from a match by scoring on his own was a great gift. As the wins stacked up, the fans worshipped him. But I wonder what Lorimer did for attendances at Elland Road. Don Revie and his players could never satisfy the casual Leeds public who came to see sport. With a 2-0 lead and a congested fixture list ahead, Leeds would relax, see the game safely to the end, and the crowd would jeer, complaining they’d paid for entertainment, not league points. We have to rebuild the scenes in our imagination, but looking through old scorelines and seeing a 2-0 home win, ‘Lorimer (2)’, you can imagine the game being settled by two first half thirty yarders, less than two seconds of incident, short-changing crowds who were always more devoted to the ebb and flow of rugby at Headingley or Hunslet. We tried watching soccer, they’d say, but they’ve this lad called Lorimer, keeps spoiling the games by winning them.

This bothered Revie intensely but I doubt Lorimer cared. There was a telling exchange on BBC Radio, when commentator Ian Dennis was remembering working with Peter on Radio Leeds. “He was always very humble,” said Dennis. Eddie Gray was also on the line, talking about the teammate he’d known since they were boys. “He was,” said Eddie, with characteristic diplomacy. “But part of that comes from, he had an inner strength. He knew how good he was.”

To put it another way, he didn’t have to boast, because he was Peter Lorimer. He could afford to be humble because it’s all written down in the record books, the footage is there to be seen. It’s natural. When he bought his first car, as a teenager in Leeds, Lorimer signed up for a driving course, did an hour, and decided he knew enough. There was no question of taking a test or getting a licence. He knew how to drive. He knew how to score goals. He knew he was good.

That his belief in his own abilities wasn’t naturally shared by others led Lorimer to stand a little apart at Leeds. Even the young players could look like old men, but Lorimer had the Beatle haircut, his lips had the Elvis curl. He was in the team aged fifteen, in September 1962, when Billy Bremner was already almost twenty, but he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t kept in. ‘No disrespect to players like Jim Storrie and others,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I thought I was better than them. And I was.’ After the record breaking cameo, hindered by injury, he didn’t play in the league again until April 1965, and then Revie bought Mike O’Grady, forcing the two to compete for a place for the next four seasons. Oddly, it was only after O’Grady’s best season, ending in the club’s first league title, that Revie made his choice. O’Grady was sold, even though his crossing looked made for the team’s new striker, Allan Clarke, and his more traditional wing play promised better balance with Eddie Gray’s on the left. The number seven shirt went full-time to Lorimer, now almost 23.

Other players felt they owed Revie a lot, if not everything. He’d made Jack Charlton an England international, a World Cup winner. He’d coached Billy Bremner through his first games, rooming with him before away matches, guarding him on the wing. Norman Hunter said the course of his entire life was changed when Revie gave him a professional contract. But just as he didn’t need driving lessons, Lorimer didn’t need grandfathering by Revie. He needed Revie to stop giving him the number 12 shirt to wear. Perhaps the years of Revie’s doubts about him inspired Lorimer’s later criticism of his manager, who he said would ‘brag’ about having sixteen internationals in his squad, then pick the same eleven for as many as three games a week because he didn’t believe enough in the rest of them.

That strident tone is a feature of Lorimer’s autobiography, written with Phil Rostron in 2002. Revie was ‘so far ahead in his thinking’ but also a ‘manoeuvrer, manipulator and planner … like a mafia boss’. Lorimer talks about the players losing confidence in him as early as 1971, stifled by the rules, dossiers and teamtalks. There are passing mentions to Revie’s superstitions, and I can’t imagine Lorimer had much time for them. The manager was plagued by doubts, that seemed to affect his team. Lorimer was all about certainty.

Jack Charlton deserved everything he got from the game and more, but was ‘awful to play with’; Allan Clarke was ‘unfathomable off the pitch’. Paul Reaney was ‘not what you would call a good footballer’, although Lorimer praised his defending: ‘the most excellent right-back’. Many of the criticisms are justified and there are plenty of compliments, too, but the attempts at diplomacy are almost funny. ‘Most of the decisions made by Jimmy Armfield were wrong’, he declares, but, ‘Jimmy is a very nice man’. Then again, although Gary Sprake ‘cost us a few trophies’, Lorimer was in favour of inviting him back to reunions despite him making allegations about match-fixing.

The most strained relationship was with Billy Bremner who, after taking over as manager from Eddie Gray, told Lorimer: ‘I want you out of the club’. He never gave a reason, and even when they laughed and joked together in later years, Lorimer never quite got over his unease. They had even been Scotland roommates — when, that is, Lorimer was allowed in the Scotland team. He had been given a life ban in 1969 for playing on an independent tour of South Africa, not knowing his national team were going to call him up, that was only rescinded when Tommy Docherty became manager and demanded his return.

You get a sense that, on the pitch and off it, Lorimer was used to settling things. In the best team in the world his right boot could win games on its own. How could he ever be wrong? That held through the awful years when he was on Ken Bates’ board, defending the chairman in a weekly column in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Lorimer then was like the bloke intervening in someone else’s argument who only makes things worse. The problems were with Ken Bates and Shaun Harvey, and no Leeds fan wanted to argue with their hero about what those two were doing. Yet it was a comment of Lorimer’s that, in 2012, I used to define Bates’ ownership. He said criticism of the board was ‘totally out of order, because we’ve done bugger all wrong’. The club had just been to League One for the first time in its history, the company that had survived since 1919 had gone bust, replaced by another that was loading on debt ahead of a disastrous takeover; Jonny Howson had just been sold, Simon Grayson had just been sacked. This was ‘The Bugger All Wrong Era’.

It’s made worse by reading in Lorimer’s autobiography where he says that in 1974, when Revie left, ‘If you had taken five drunks off the local Holbeck Moor at that time and given them that club, with that money, they could not have knackered the club more efficiently and more effectively than the directors proceeded to do’. If he could see it then, why couldn’t he see it in 2012?

In the end you forgive those few seasons of disappointing rancour because of the decades of pleasure, that we wouldn’t have had if that wasn’t how he was. It’s funny how playing styles can reflect or reveal character. Eddie Gray, the soft-footed magician of the wing, who nurtured two generations of young players in his own image as a coach, is a soft-spoken diplomat, a man with a steel nerve but time and a nice word for everyone. Peter Lorimer was exactly how you’d expect someone to be who could belt a football harder than specialised machinery. You could try to stop Gray with a tackle. It was better just to get out of Lorimer’s way. With both, sometimes you have rewind the footage of them playing to see what happened, but for very different reasons. Lorimer was not subtle.

But Lorimer was unwavering. That was the point. Football is a game of questions: can we pass? can we cross? can we beat an opponent? can we create a chance? can we score a goal? Peter Lorimer’s right boot was full of answers. At a constant speed of ninety miles an hour, a ball will take around 0.68 seconds to travel thirty yards. That journey 238 times would take a little under 2 minutes and 42 seconds. 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.

Imagine having the confidence. Imagine Leeds without Lorimer’s goals, Revie’s team without his self-belief. When it comes to football, what, after all, is the most important thing? The precise thing Peter Lorimer knew he was better than anyone else at. 238 goals proved it.

Only one word for that post "Fan' Dabi' Dozi"

[Starman4291]

What a number 2s 12 months its been for ex leeds ex players- really takes the shine off are achievements in the premiership