The squinting kid who grew into giant of global game

Denis Law stood on the platform at Huddersfield train station; slim, bespectacled and 15-years old, so small and so inconsequential that the waiting officials from his new club didn’t pick him out in the crowd.

“You’re Law?” one of them eventually twigged. “Really?”

Really. That young lad grew into a giant of the global game. The King, as he would come to be known.

The only British player good enough to get in the Brazil team of the day, said Pele. The “quickest thinking footballer I have ever seen” said Bill Shankly. “My hero” said Sir Alex Ferguson.

The Lawman has gone but what a life he lived and what a player he was. He scored a remarkable number of goals for his clubs and his country, but he was way more than a great predator in front of goal.

He had elegance, charisma and courage. He was a playmaker and a goalscorer, a total footballer, adored by his team-mates.

He was aggressive, had blistering acceleration, fantastic acrobatic ability and unerring accuracy in front of goal, with his feet and with his head.

He was gallus and unselfish and frequently unplayable.

What a giant of the global game the Aberdonian was and what a story he leaves behind.

Epic at every turn, utterly startling when you revisit his early days as one of seven children reared in a council flat, two miles from Pittodrie, where he’d watched the Dons whenever money would allow it.

This footballing colossus had a challenging beginning.

He lived with strabismus, a condition that left him with squint eyes, a difficulty focusing on objects in front of him, and left him open to merciless treatment from his peers.

As a kid, with thick glasses, he was called Cockeye.

He only got his first pair of football boots when he was a teenager. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

On the pitch, he was slight but combative. He would close one eye to help his vision and go from there. Nobody ever described him as a physical specimen, but a player? Oh he was a player all right.

So he got off the train at Huddersfield in the mid-1950s and started his football adventure.

His manager was Andy Beattie, a former Scotland player who also managed his country. “The boy’s a freak,” Beattie declared. “Never did I see a less likely football prospect. Weak and puny.”

They saw something in him, though. Hunger, technique, pace. They got him an operation to fix his eye condition.

When Beattie left and was replaced by Shankly, the future Liverpool manager took Law under his wing, fed him heartily to build up his strength and oversaw every aspect of his physical development.

When we think of Law we automatically think of Sir Matt Busby, but another great Scot helped him first.

He made his debut at 16 in 1956. He was an international two years later, the youngest player to win a Scotland cap in 60 years. He scored, naturally.

Law was brilliant and belligerent. He had an aggressive nature that didn’t sit well with some.

His second cap was against Northern Ireland, led by the great Danny Blanchflower. “If that is him at 18, I would not like to play against him when he’s 24,” said an opponent when talking about Law’s excellence but also his aggressive nature.

“The [Scotland] selectors may have found an inside-forward but, at the same time, they have bought themselves a bit of trouble,” reported The Observer.

When Shankly moved to Liverpool in 1959, he wanted to bring Law with him, but couldn’t afford the asking price. Busby wanted him at United, but instead Law moved to Manchester City, in 1960, for a British record transfer fee of £55,000.

He stayed for one season and scored 21 goals in 44 games, which would have been more had an FA Cup match against Luton not been abandoned with 20 minutes to go. Law had already scored six times by then.

Then he went to Torino for £110,000, another record fee for a British player.

He was greeted as a hero in Turin, but the scene there was too claustrophobic for such a free spirit.

The club limited his freedom, the media obsessed about him and opponents subjected him to the kind of brutality reserved mostly for players they feared the most. By the end, he felt a bit like a prisoner, a marked man in every sense.

After one season he escaped and forced Torino to sell him, to Manchester United as it turned out. It was 1962 and his greatest years were only just starting. He was 22 years old.

At his first training session at United, Bobby Charlton approached and told Law how happy he was to see him at the club.

As Charlton recalled: “He gave me that sidelong, slightly quizzical smile that would become so familiar to me down the years. It was though a lot of the magic and the aura of the old United team had been conjured up at a single stroke.”

George Best, Denis Law, Bobby Charlton - the holy trinity in the Theatre of Dreams.

Best recalled once that Law could score goals from a hundredth of a chance, not to mind half a chance. He scored 29 in 44 games in his first season, including one in a victorious FA Cup final that he dominated.

The following season he scored 46 in 42 and won the Ballon d’Or. The season after, he scored 28 times as United won the league for the first time since the Munich air disaster.

Law was one of the most revered players on the planet by then. And one of the most worshipped in his homeland.

Scotland didn’t lack football icons in those days - the Lisbon Lions had just become immortal - but a certain day at Wembley in 1967 just added to Law’s legend.

In inspiring a victory over the then world champions, he elevated himself to a new level. Law didn’t just want to beat England, he wanted to batter them into the ground and he made no secret of it.

In a Scotland career that lasted 16 years and brought 30 goals in 55 games, that was a day that will live forever.

That year, 1967, saw United win the league again, a mere warm-up routine for what was to follow in 1968.

Sadly, Law missed out on the glory of Wembley and the emotion of Busby’s team winning the European Cup a decade after his Babes perished in Munich.

He was injured for the semi-final and final. His body was beginning to fail. Cortisone injections were required more often to get him through.

On the night of the final he was in a Manchester hospital recovering from a knee operation. Busby arrived at his bed-side the day after with the trophy.

Law recovered, scored 30 in 45 games in 1968-69, but the great United force was about to unravel.

Busby left to be replaced by Wilf McGuinness. McGuinness left to be replaced by Frank O’Farrell. O’Farrell left to be replaced by Tommy Docherty.

The good times had gone. And, soon, Law would be gone, too.

It hurt him, no doubt about it. He rejoined City even though he was coming to the end of the road.

In City’s last game of the 1973-74 season, against a relegation-haunted United at Old Trafford, Law famously scored with a back-heel which gave City a 1-0 lead with nine minutes left to play.

United got relegated. The story has been retold many times, in almost poetic terms, about how Law sealed the fate of the club he loved the most, but he didn’t.

Results elsewhere meant they were going down regardless of what Law did, but it bothered him none the less. “I seldom felt so depressed as I did that weekend,” he said later.

Law went to the World Cup in 1974 and began the season with City, but retired almost immediately on 10 August. His body had had enough.

His greatness had been established long, long before he kicked his last ball and it will endure, through the generations and for all-time.