Tommy Cummings

Tommy Cummings
Personnel
Surname	Thomas Smith Cummings
birthday	September 12, 1928
place of birth	Sunderland ,  England
date of death	July 12, 2009
Place of death	Burnley ,  England
position	Middle runner
Juniors
Years	station
	Hilton Colliery
	Stanley United
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1947-1963	Burnley FC	434 (3)
1963-1964	Mansfield Town	10 (0)
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1953-1956	England B	3 (0)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1963-1967	Mansfield Town
1967-1968	Aston Villa
1 Only league games are given.

Thomas Smith "Tommy" Cummings (born September 12, 1928 in Sunderland , † July 12, 2009 in Burnley ) was an English football player and coach . As a middle runner , he played 479 competitive games at Burnley FC for more than 15 years and was a member of the championship team from 1960 .

Athletic career

Player career

The son of a miner first played in his home country for the colliery team Hylton Colliery Welfare and the amateur club Stanley United , after leaving school and starting to work at a shipyard in Wear at the same time. As a teenager, Cummings took part with a British selection in a football tournament in France and convinced the scouts of the local clubs. However, he returned to England and did some trial training sessions. Auditions were unsuccessful at Blackpool and Tottenham Hotspur , and this cleared the way for Burnley . In October 1947 he signed a part-time contract with the "Weinroten" while he continued his training as a mining engineer, which he had started in the meantime. Everyday life turned out to be exhausting for him when his underground shifts were regularly followed by strenuous training sessions. In the middle of the 1948/49 season, the hard work was rewarded with a regular place in the first team. Previously, the regular middle runner Alan Brown had left the club for Notts County .

After his first division debut on December 18, 1948 against Manchester City (2-2), he developed steadily in the team of coach Frank Hill . Cummings was at the center of a well-organized defense and the club, which had only risen from second division in 1947, was mostly in the upper half of the table thanks to his help. In October 1950 he was shortly before an A international match for England in Belfast. However, he was just as little used as in the later course of his career and only one appearance for a selection of the Football League and three games for the England B team were granted to him - this was mainly due to competitors such as Jack Froggatt , Harry Johnston and Billy Wright . At Burnley, however, he only missed a handful of competitive games in the early 1950s. His style of play was characterized by both combat strength and speed, so he was well equipped in duels with different types of center forward - against nimble opponents such as Jackie Milburn and Stan Mortensen or more robust contemporaries such as Nat Lofthouse and Trevor Ford . He was less well known for his offensive actions, with the exception of his winning goal against Newcastle United in January 1952 , when he captured the ball deep in his own half shortly before the end of the game and sought the conclusion after a series of won tackles in the forward gear - shot throughout his career he only got two more goals. The career of Cummings, who had also taken over the captaincy from Harry Mather in 1951, stalled in August 1956. He preferred a serious knee injury that largely put him out of action for almost two years. It was not infrequently written off, but under the new trainer Harry Potts he experienced his second "spring".

Cummings, who had meanwhile given up his captaincy to Jimmy Adamson , contributed with 39 league games in the 1958/59 season to a respectable seventh place . The following year he celebrated the greatest success of his career by winning the English championship . Cummings had started the 1959/60 season on the left side of defense, but then lost the place to the aspiring Alex Elder . Then he acted together with Brian Miller in the half position as an outside runner - he benefited from Bobby Seith 's dispute with Burnley's President Bob Lord, after which Seith was removed from the team. The next and final milestone in Cummings' career was reaching the FA Cup final in 1962 , in which he and his men lost 3-1 to Tottenham Hotspur . After that, the now 34-year-old only played two more games and the much younger John Talbut then ousted him. In March 1963, he then accepted an offer from the fourth division club Mansfield Town as a player-coach . Shortly thereafter, Cummings reached fourth place with the new club, which qualified for promotion to the third division. As a player, he rarely appeared and he quickly focused on coaching.

Coaching career

Cummings' career as a coach ran steeply upwards in Mansfield and in the 1964/65 season his team missed promotion to the second division only just because of the poorer goal quotient against Bristol City . A disappointing season in 1965/66 was followed by a conciliatory last year with a good midfield position before he was relegated to the first division Aston Villa in July 1967 .

His involvement with the traditional club was disappointing and in the second division season 1967/68 the "Villans" landed deep in the lower half of the table in 16th place. The mood in the club was just as bad as the audience response. Nevertheless, Cummings held on to the end of the season in his office, but only two wins in the first 18 league games of the subsequent season 1968/69 and a permanent place in the relegation zone ensured his dismissal in November 1968. He then turned his back on the professional football business and worked in the catering industry. Here he ran the Shooters Arms in Nelson for several years . He died at the age of 80 in Queengate, a district of Burnley.

Title / Awards

• English Championship (1): 1960
• Charity Shield (1): 1960 (shared)

Web links

• Obituary of the Independent
• Statistical data from the Post War English & Scottish Football League AZ Player's Database
• Tommy Cummings in the barryhugmansfootballers.com database. Retrieved August 16, 2020.

Individual evidence

1. ^ "England - International Results B-Team - Details" (RSSSF)
2. ↑ ^{a b} "Tommy Cummings" (Clarets Mad)
3. ^ Rob Bishop / Frank Holt: Aston Villa - The Complete Record . DB Publishing, Derby, 2010, ISBN 978-1-85983-805-1 , pp. 306 .