Tom Finney: The Loss Of One Of Football’s Great Gentlemen
Tom Finney: The Loss Of One Of Football's Great Gentlemen
By Ian on Feb 15, 2025 in History, Latest | 0 comments
There will be tears at Deepdale this afternoon, of course, and understandably so. After all, the announcement of the death of Tom Finney yesterday at the age of ninety-one has brought the curtain down on one of football's most enduring love affairs, that of the modest player blessed with abilities beyond the reach of all bar a select few and the club that he represented with such distinction for so many years. But there will also be celebration. Each and every Preston North End player will wear a shirt bearing his name, and there will be as much applause as there will be silence. A life so well lived deserves such treatment.
His was a career played out in the years immediately prior to the invasion of television cameras that we take so much for granted these days. As such, perhaps the most appropriate way in which we can assess his impact on the landscape of post-war English football is from the recollections of his contempories. Bill Shankly, who played alongside Finney at Preston, for example, commented on the ability gap between the winger and the rest of his team that, "Tom should claim income tax relief… for his ten dependants," and that, "Tom Finney would have been great in any team, in any match and in any age… even if he had been wearing an overcoat."
It was also a career curtailed, as were those of so many of his contempories, by war. His playing career had already been put on hold a little by his father's insistence on completing an apprenticeship in plumbing – a decision that would come to see him right at the end of his career, playing as he did during the final years of the Football League's suffocating maxmum wage rule – rather than signing for the club three years earlier, and his nascent playing career was then put on hold for a further six years by the outbreak of war in September 1939. Finney saw active service in Egypt and Italy before finally making his Preston North End debut in August 1946.
One player, however, can seldom carry an moderate team to sustained success on his own, and Finney's career ended with his only playing medal being the Second Division championship medal won in 1951 which came, perhaps notably, two years after the club had been relegated from the First Division at the end of a season during which, for Finney, had been blighted by injury. Other than this medal and the plaudits of the press (he was voted the Football Writers Association's Player of The
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