"It's not that he didn't care or he did care but, when I said sorry to him, I confronted it and said, 'I really looked up to you as a kid, you were my idol, everyone in New Zealand loves you and I loved you, so when I played against you it was just emotion, passion took over, you were playing dirty on me and I kneed you.
"He's one of the best at [dirty play]."
The 70-test playmaker revealed he wasn't prepared for the backlash he faced from the country he had grown up in at the time.
"I look back at it now and I wasn't ready for it," Cooper said.
"I had the expectation of 2011 of playing good football but now I had the pressure of all these guys hating me as well, and a whole country, not just the rugby public. I couldn't go anywhere. I was on the team bus and there were signs 'I hope you break your leg, I hope you die in this game'.
"If I had my time again, [because] I know how to handle it now, I'd just say, 'Yeah I did it, so what?'. Not 'So what?', but 'It's part of footy, it was a bad play but I did it', so what could people say?"