Tommy Smith was born in Anfield, Liverpool on Thursday the 5th of April 1945 and as an only child, joined Liverpool straight from school as a 15-year-old, a year after his father had died from pneumonia. Beginning on the ground staff he found himself doing jobs for Harry the Paint and digging Mr Shankly's garden. He had captained Liverpool Boys and soon after his league debut at the age of 17 led the England youth team in a 1963 tournament, impressing Shankly enough to immediately play for the 'A' team and he turned professional in the summer of 1962, on wages of £18-a-week. Makingade his First Division debut in the 1962-63 season, as a centre-forward, this proved to be his only appearance of that campaign, and he was not picked at all the following season, when Liverpool won the League Championship for the first time in almost two decades. However in the 1964-65 season, having moved into defence, he firmly established himself there with 25 appearances, helping Liverpool to win their first ever FA Cup with the 2-1 defeat of Leeds United at Wembley in the final.
Winning his first League Championship medal in 1965-66, when he played in all 42 matches, he had to wait another seven years before getting his second, in the 1972-73 season, by which time he had been club captain for two years. In that campaign he also skippered the side to the 1973 Uefa Cup, with a 3-2 aggregate win in the final against Borussia Mönchengladbach, but lost this role shortly afterwards when he rather recklessly complained to Shankly about being dropped for a big match against Arsenal in November 1973, leaving Anfield in high dudgeon when the teams were announced shortly before kick-off. The manager responded in typically forthright fashion by giving the captaincy to Emlyn Hughes which cooled Tommy's relationship both with Shankly, in the short term at least, and Emlyn more permanently, never speaking to him again off the pitch. Switching to right-back around this time, he won a second FA Cup medal in 1974 when Liverpool beat Newcastle United in the final, Shankly’s last competitive game in charge, and in the 1975-76 season, under Paisley, he won another League Championship medal, this time playing in 24 league games.
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| Tackling Leeds United's Eddie Gray |
Into his 30s he was making fewer appearances on account of the arrival of Phil Thompson and Phil Neal, and in both legs of the 1976 Uefa Cup final, which Liverpool won 4-3 on aggregate against Club Brugge, he played at left-back. At the beginning of the 1976-77 season he announced that he would retire at the end of the campaign, and by March had only played only three times in the league, but then Phil Thompson picked up an injury and Tommy subsequently appeared in the final 13 fixtures of the league, which Liverpool again won. Crucially, he was also selected in the starting line up for the 1977 European Cup final in Rome where, at the Olympic Stadium against Borussia, there was a notable piece of opportunism. Liverpool had taken the lead through Terry McDermott, but Borussia had equalised. Then, 20 minutes into the second half, Steve Heighway took a corner from the left, two German defenders followed Kevin Keegan, leaving a gap into which Tommy ran to head the ball home and Liverpool went on to win 3-1. That really should have been his swansong, but he then decided to stay on for another season making 22 league appearances as Liverpool finished as runners-up in the First Division. He would probably have featured in the club’s second European Cup final win, 1-0 against Club Brugge, but broke his toe by dropping a large hammer on to his foot while doing some DIY at home shortly before the final. After a loan spell at Tampa Bay Rowdies in 1976 and a spell with Los Angeles Aztecs in 1978, in that summer, the year he was made a MBE, Tommy joined Swansea City, where he made more than 30 appearances in the Third Division, helping them to gain promotion. Even at that stage in his career he was more than able to live up to his old nickname, 'The Anfield Iron', when, against Tottenham Hotspur, he scythed into Osvaldo Ardiles. Typically defiant, he insisted that he had wanted to acquaint Ardiles with the realities of football in Britain. He also threatened to sue one newspaper that had been critical of his ferocity.
He retired in 1979 with his hard-man reputation fully intact and with a fund of stories to tell on the after-dinner circuit. One in particular that he liked to relate involved the Tottenham striker Jimmy Greaves, to whom he once claimed to have handed, in menace, a menu from Liverpool Infirmary as he ran on to the field. The reputation Tommy forged for himself as a hard man belies the huge amount of ability and skill he had and he was only sent off once (for dissent) and booked three times in his entire career. Having won ten caps for the England Under 23 team it was an anomaly that he only won one full England cap, against Wales at Wembley in 1971. "Tommy Smith wasn't born," Shankly once said. "He was quarried. He was born a man, he was never a boy." In total he made 638 appearances for Liverpool and won the UEFA Cup twice, a European Super Cup, four league titles and two FA Cups to go alongside that shimmering European Cup.
He had a brief spell as a youth coach at Liverpool before turning from the football field to the Anfield press box, writing a weekly column for the Liverpool Echo for 35 years and working on local radio. In 1980 he took over the lease of the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool as a business venture, but sold it a few years later, having made little in the way of profit. In 2007 he suffered a heart attack, and in his later years was painfully afflicted by crippling rheumatoid arthritis. In 2014 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Tommy passed away on the 12th of April 2019 (aged 74). He was voted into 25th place in the official club website poll "100 Players Who Shook The Kop".
see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2026/09/merseyside-for-sport-tommy-wright.html
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