Preston, last in the top division in 1961, were FA Cup runners-up in 1954 and 1964, quarter-finalists twice more in that period while Burnley, Football League champions in 1960, reached the semis in 1961 and lost the 1962 final.
The 1954 final was supposed to be the “Finney Final”, to follow Blackpool’s 1953 “Matthews Final”, but “the Preston Plumber” never got to emulate his England wing partner Stanley in winning a major medal.
This was a last hurrah of the provincial town club – Preston became a city only in 2002 – as the lifting of footballers’ maximum wage in 1961 began a drift towards Lancashire’s metropolitan areas of Liverpool and Manchester from the mill towns.
“They went into this of their own accord.” Arthur Hopcraft, emeritus chronicler of that football age, compared Lord to Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, whose “we will bury you” issued to Western diplomats in 1956 was very much of the Lord school.
A time of schoolboys being able to list the era’s classic finals dipped in Pathé news sepia may have passed but reminiscing harks back to a time when towns rather than cities were English football’s epicentres.
