Search: ' Tom Finney'

Few clubs can be held responsible for the rebirth of a club, but Gavin Willacy believes Preston would not be where they are now without the Town End, which even enjoyed a moment of life after death

Most readers probably have no idea what the Town End at Deep­dale is. It’s now known as the Alan Kelly Town End, a steep modern stand with the face of Preston’s record appearance-maker usually covered up by season-ticket holders’ bums. Al­though the fans chose to name the stand after Kelly – a Republic of Ireland keeper who played 447 times for the club in the 1960s and 1970s – it is only in the last decade that the Town End has become an integral part of North End folklore.

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Bill Shankly was not just a football manager: he was a communicator. Barney Ronay listened to his words come to life and was reminded of a thousand pale imitations

In 1997 a plaque was unveiled in Glenbuck commemorating the 55 professional footballers the Scottish mining village produced during the last century. Among them was Bill Shankly accompanied, even here, by what have become his defining epithets: “the legend, the genius, the man”. This seems to be more than just a localised view. “I watched his genius un­fold,” wrote Tom Finney in 1993. “A great man, a great manager and a great psychologist,” enthused Kevin Keegan. No mention of Shankly, it seems, is complete with­out a magisterial turn of phrase. The legend, the greatest, the granditudelissimus – when it comes to Shankly we all turn into Don King.

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England may have lost twice to the United States but have inflicted frequent and often quite heavy revenge, beginning, as Gavin Willacy relates, with Tom Finney in 1953

Three years after their humiliation by the United States in Belo Horizonte, Alf Ramsey, Billy Wright, Jimmy Dickinson and Tom Finney were given the chance to gain some sort of revenge on those pesky Americans when the FA sent England on their regular tour of the Americas.

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Every Saturday three men decide the results of postponed matches. If you don't want to find out why and how, look away now, because Al Needham met them

Whenever I have an argument with anyone about the innate superiority of British football over any oth­er sporting entity in the world, I always keep one killer argument in reserve: the fact that we have a Pools Pan­el. It gives off the impression to foreigners that our game is so important that when matches can’t be play­ed, we actually have a platoon of experts who decide the result for us. Of course, they could counter this fact by pointing out that if every team in the country had the kind of facilities that they should have in the 21st century, there would be no need for a Pools Panel, but I counter that by stating that, even if there was a nuclear holocaust, the Pools Panel are probably on standby to decide entire seasons until civilisation recovered. That shuts them up a treat.

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Players in the "old days" knew how to behave, unlike the overpaid prima-donnas of today. Not at all, says Steve Field

Think of an example of boisterous, drunken or oafish behaviour on the part of a highly-paid football personality. It might be Peter Beagrie’s Great Escape re-enactment in a hotel foyer, Brian Law’s hijack of a West Midlands Travel single-decker, Stan Collymore doing just about any­thing. The alleged misdemeanour could be sex­ual (Pleat, Shilton), financial (Macari, Venables), addiction-related or violent (too many to men­tion). Whatever, you can be sure of one thing. Within hours of the story breaking, pundits will be queuing up to proclaim that such a thing would never have happened in The Old Days.

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