Whether you’re a Leeds United fan or not, you have to take your hat off to their captain Liam Cooper.
The big defender skippered Marcelo Bielsa’s side to a Championship title last season en route to booking their Premier League return after a 16-year absence.
Cooper has been an ever-present figure in Bielsa’s best XI over the past three seasons but that wasn’t the case earlier in his Leeds career, even as recently as Garry Monk’s reign during the 2016-17 season.
Given that he has struggled to play regularly under former United coaches in the not too distant past in the Championship, it was certainly interesting to see how he’d perform in the top flight but, to his credit, Cooper has been one of Bielsa’s best and most consistent players this season.
That’s certainly the opinion of former Leeds man Simon Johnson, who claims that the former Chesterfield stalwart – a £600,000 signing by the Elland Road side in 2014 – has been ‘playing out of his skin’.
Much of the credit Cooper deserves stems from the fact that he has simply had to be brilliant.
Leeds spent a lot of money on two centre-backs last summer in the form of Robin Koch and Diego Llorente, but exactly 1,000 thousand minutes of Premier League action this season between them due to injury meant that the Scotland defender couldn’t afford to be anything less than stellar.
And to his credit, he hasn’t been.
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