JANUARY 2002, and Colin Cooper's world is about to fall apart. Just hours after helping his side beat Manchester United in the fourth round of the FA Cup, the Middlesbrough defender will lose his two-year-old son, Finlay, after he swallows a screw that has fallen from a toy chair.

It is a loss that will affect him profoundly.

By his own admission, Cooper has been living in a cocoon since the age of 16.

First employed at Ayresome Park as a teenage apprentice, the Sedgefield-born centre-half has been protected by a footballing bubble.

Suddenly, that bubble has burst and there is nothing to shelter Cooper from the wider world with all of its tragedies and trauma.

Stricken with grief, one of football's most affable figures retreats into his shell. He questions how to pick up the pieces of a life that has been transformed overnight. He weeps for his wife, Julie, and his daughters, Annie, Molly and Daisy. And, perhaps most profoundly of all, he wonders whether his lifelong devotion to football has been nothing more than a monumental waste.

It is an obvious reaction. In a time of such grief, what difference can a game make, even if it is the most popular and celebrated game in the world?

Four years on and Cooper has received his answer. Football is not a matter of life and death - but it can be a force for hope and recovery. It can also provide meaning when all previous certainties have vanished.

"I go back to those days four years ago, and I remember sitting down with my wife and my children and saying, 'Football's not for me any more," explained Cooper when we met at Middlesbrough's Rockliffe Park training ground last week.

"I'd had a good career by then and I didn't have the heart or the want or the need to drag myself back to the game after everything that had happened.

"But we sat down and said, 'It's all we've ever known. If we are going to get back to any kind of normality as a family, then football is what we are going to have to do.

"It was at that point that my wife told me to get my backside into gear and get back on to the training ground. Ultimately, that was the best way of easing myself towards normality.

"Straight away, I was embraced by the whole of football. I was getting letters and cards from all over England.

"It was incredible and it made me reflect on how much good there is in the game. People might run it down, but my experiences taught me all about what football can mean.

"It also taught me about the people of Middlesbrough. They were an inspiration and they helped all of my family through some of the darkest days you can imagine."

Today, when Boro take on Chievo in their final pre-season friendly, Cooper finally gets the opportunity to express his thanks.

As a club, Middlesbrough were unable to pay tribute to the 39-year-old when he made the 420th and final league appearance of his career at Fulham on the final day of last season.

Consequently, they have earmarked today's game as a benefit match in Cooper's honour, and the current reserve-team coach is determined to make the most of the profile and status he has been afforded.

This afternoon's match marks the launch of the Finlay Cooper Fund, a trust that will raise thousands of pounds for charities in Teesside and North Yorkshire.

It also marks the beginning of a process of catharsis. Just as football helped Cooper to get his own life in order, so Cooper wants to use the game to help thousands of youngsters better their own lives.

"The people at this football club have given me this opportunity, so I feel that it's only right and proper to do something good with it," said Cooper.

"That's why we came up with the idea of forming a fund in Finlay's name. We want it to do some good for children in the local area.

"But it's not just a case of having the game, getting some money and doling it out. I want this to continue over the years. I want to ease money out to different places at different times.

"I'd like to say to charities, 'Is there anything that you need?' I'd like to make our contribution personal. I want to get to know people and feel as though we're having a genuine impact on the local area."

If his fund-raising impact is anything like his footballing legacy, Teesside's charities could be in for a boom time.

Born in County Durham in 1967, Cooper, who was scouted as a teenager at Sedgefield Secondary School, joined Middlesbrough as an apprentice in 1983.

At the time, he joined a club that was radically different from the ultra-professional outfit that competes in the upper echelons of the Premiership today.

"The kids now have it fantastic," said Cooper. "It's a wildly different thing to what I experienced. When I joined as an apprentice, our brief was to get our backsides down to Ayresome Park first thing on a morning so we could get the best kit we could.

"Our day consisted of looking after our professionals, doing our own training, seeing to the professionals again at lunch time and making sure they had new kit and boots if they needed them in the afternoon, and then doing our training again after lunch.

"Let's just say that there were certain people that would make sure that their apprentices would shine their boots until they could see their face in them. It was 20 years ago, and that isn't the way it is now, but they were good times."

As every Middlesbrough fan knows, though, the good times quickly stopped. By 1986, the club was in liquidation and Cooper was resigned to his career being finished before it had really begun.

"We look back through rose-coloured spectacles, but I don't think we really knew how close the club was to going out of business," he said.

"It was a bizarre time. We would turn up at Ayresome Park - we were only allowed in to get our kit and our boots - and we had to go straight back out and find somewhere to train.

"It would be a different place every day. We ended up training at places like Albert Park or the Kirklevington young offenders institute.

"It was really a case of finding any place where we could make a pitch. Kirklevington was like Wembley because it had two pitches already marked out for us!

"The lucky point of it was that we were still getting paid right through it. We had to go down to the Town Hall - we weren't allowed to pick our wages up from the football club, we had to go to the Town Hall every fortnight to get our wages from the receivers.

"But at least we were still getting paid.

"The day we ran out at Hartlepool was a relief, but it was an even bigger relief when we played Hartlepool in the Littlewoods Cup a couple of days later and we were back at Ayresome Park.

"That made us think that things were starting to sort themselves out a little bit."

Ultimately, of course, the events of 1986 were the prelude to an era of unprecedented development.

Cooper has been witness to most of it - spells at Millwall and Nottingham Forest interrupted his Boro career - but chairman Steve Gibson has been the biggest constant during the last two decades.

"We were lucky in 1986 that the chairman was part of the consortium that rescued the club," said Cooper.

"He had a vision in his mind from that day on, and the day he took over the actual chairmanship of the club was the day the club changed.

"It was the best day in this club's history.

"He has built up a top, top Premiership club from one that was pretty much dead and buried only ten years before.

"No football fan around the country would have a bad word to say about Steve Gibson. We all know what his vision was and he's still not there yet."

The same could be said of Cooper. After taking control of Boro's reserve-team this summer, the recently-retired defender remains as ambitious as ever.

In the future, though, his goals will not be restricted to the football pitch.

After recovering from one of the most harrowing experiences imaginable, Cooper is determined to do all he can to help others.

It is an attitude that sits comfortably with one of Middlesbrough's most cherished sons.