'AC MILAN’s Andriy Shevchenko was crowned European Player of the Year this week, but he will never usurp The King. That title rests with the only Scot to have won the continent’s top individual honour — Denis Law.
Law was voted Europe’s greatest footballer 40 years ago, winning the annual ballot of the continent’s football journalists by a comfortable margin. The bare statistics alone suggest why the slight striker beat the best players of his generation to the prize.
He scored 30 league goals for Manchester United in the 1963-64 season, as well as ten in the FA Cup and six more in the Cup Winners’ Cup. It would have been even more, but for a 28-day ban handed out by the FA in December 1963 for a string of on-field misdemeanours.
For Scotland, too, Law’s golden season was stuffed with goals. It started with a hat-trick in Oslo as Scotland contrived to lose a game they dominated 4-3. Then they went to Spain and, inspired by Law, won by the now unimaginable scoreline of 6-2. Law also scored four in the return with Norway, which Scotland won 6-1 at Hampden. It was one of nine occasions that season when he scored three or more in a game.
Law needed reservoirs of determination to become a footballer at all. He grew up with a chronic squint, and learnt to play the game with his right eye tight shut so he could focus with his one good eye. It wasn’t until he was an established pro that he had an operation to cure the condition.
As well as being half-blind, the young Law was vanishingly skinny. He turned up for a trial at Huddersfield Town, and the assistant manager recommended the runt be sent home to Aberdeen on the next available train. Bill Shankly later revised his hasty opinion, prescribed the boy a steady diet of steak and milk, made him into a professional footballer and later bracketed him with Tom Finney as one of his two favourite footballers of all time.
Perhaps Law’s finest hour and a half in that year of years came in October 1963, when he lined up with Jim Baxter for Rest of the World, to play England at Wembley in the game to celebrate the FA’s centenary. The global all-star team lost 2-1, but Law stood out in a cast of talent featuring legends such as Di Stefano, Puskas, Eusebio and Gento.
Despite Law’s stately progress, he ended the season without any team honours. United lost to Sporting Lisbon in the Cup Winners’ Cup quarter-final, to West Ham United in the FA Cup semi-final, and they finished second behind Liverpool in the first division.
Despite that, it was still Law’s year, a time when he proved he was one of Scotland’s greatest players. He sits easily in the pantheon of former European Players of the Year, the likes of Puskas, Best, Cruyff and Zidane. They are all legends — but there is still only one King.'