Peter Lorimer

They timed it, eventually, and the number that came back was ninety miles per hour. Peter Lorimer struck a football harder than anyone in Britain, and the nickname — Hotshot — undersold what it was actually like to face: a low, flat, rising ball hit early from twenty-five yards with almost no backlift, which meant goalkeepers had no time to set. He scored 238 goals for Leeds United, more than any player in the club's history, and he did it from a wide position, which is close to absurd. Born in Dundee in 1946, Lorimer signed for Leeds at fifteen and made his debut at fifteen years and 289 days, the youngest player in the club's history, then stayed for two spells across nearly twenty years and 705 appearances. He played as a right-winger and later as a deeper wide midfielder, and though the shot defined him, the rest of the game was more complete than the reputation suggested: he crossed accurately, delivered set pieces, and worked defensively to the standard Don Revie required of everyone. He was quick over short distances rather than a pure flyer, and his finishing from distance gave Leeds a scoring threat from areas where opponents did not defend. He won two First Division titles (1969, 1974), the FA Cup in 1972, the League Cup in 1968 and two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups, and played in the 1975 European Cup final — where he had a goal disallowed in a decision Leeds supporters have never accepted. For Scotland he won 21 caps and played at the 1974 World Cup, where they went out unbeaten. His limitations were partly of style. Lorimer's shot selection was ambitious to a fault: he took efforts from range in situations where a pass would have been better, and his conversion rate, though remarkable in absolute terms, came with a substantial volume of wasted possession. He was not a great dribbler and rarely beat men repeatedly in isolation, depending instead on being found in shooting positions. Against defences that pressed him quickly and denied the yard he needed to strike, his influence dropped sharply. Temperamentally he was the calmest man in the most confrontational team in Britain. Lorimer was quiet, dry and even-tempered in a dressing room built around Bremner's ferocity and Revie's obsessive control, and he took no part in the running feuds and provocations that made Leeds so widely disliked — he fouled rarely, argued with referees seldom, and responded to the constant physical treatment that wide players received in the seventies without retaliation. He was not a leader and made no attempt to be one, functioning as a specialist within a system: the man who arrived, struck the ball, and jogged back. Pressure appeared not to register; he took the important free-kicks and penalties without any visible change in demeanour, and his output was largely unaffected by crowd or occasion. He was fiercely loyal to Leeds, returning after a spell in North America and later serving the club as a director and columnist for decades, and he remained the custodian of Revie's era in public memory long after the others had moved on. Away from football he ran a pub in Leeds for years, was entirely without pretension, and lived a life of conspicuous ordinariness. Devastating and undramatic, Lorimer was the quiet specialist at the heart of the loudest team England has produced.