Tommy Blenkinsopp, a footballer from an entirely different age but remembered with enduring affection by this one, has died, aged 83. He will be buried this morning in his native Witton Park.

Tommy, by every account, was one hell of a right half, starred for Middlesbrough after the war, had an England trial and twice represented the Football League. By every account he liked a drink, an' all.

"My dad used to talk about the Saturday afternoon when Tommy had to be carried from the pub to a taxi, got taken to Ayresome Park and played a blinder," insisted one caller this week.

"If his brains hadn't all been in his boots he'd have played for England without question," said a second.

"They used to call him Mucky Blenk," added another, though that was probably because of all the clarts.

While reports of his breath may greatly have been exaggerated - "if you were drunk they'd have smelled it a hundred miles off," he once told the column - there was no question that Tommy had a considerable thirst for a family man earning £12 a week.

Even some fellow professionals knew him as Mr Bass, and not because of his singing voice, either.

He'd begun with Witton Park Institute in the Stanley and District League, so shy that when they won the championship he sent his mother to the village hall dance in order to collect his medal.

Afterwards he had a brief Northern League spell at West Auckland, transferred to Grimsby Town before the war and in 1948 joined the Boro, where he was to make 98 League appearances in four years.

We first met in 1991. Having naively assumed that he'd be home in Witton Park we eventually found Tommy - a former Green Howard - in the DLI Club in Bishop Auckland.

He'd walked the three miles into town, as usually he did, a couple of pounds in his pocket and an incorrigible twinkle in his eye.

"We'd go to the Corporation Hotel before the game all right - me, Wilfy Mannion, Dickie Robinson and Billy Whittaker - but we'd have two raw eggs, good for your wind, and two glasses of sherry. Everyone thought that if you were in a pub you got drunk.

"The directors were there, too, you couldn't even have butter on your toast because it was greasy. We were professionals, I never went onto a football field with beer in me belly, never."

He'd still vividly recall his first Football League appearance - Ditchburn, Ramsey, Robinson; Blenkinsopp, Hughes, Arthur Wright; Matthews, Morris, Milburn, Shackleton, Langton - just as his former teammate Johnny Spuhler, now 86, recalls Tommy's England trial.

"Everyone came all dressed up, suitcases and everything. Tommy and Dickie Robinson, our right back, arrived with their boots wrapped in newspaper. They were a right couple."

Tommy had in 1991 recalled going with Johnny Spuhler to a darts presentation evening at the Princess Alice in Middlesbrough - "we had four halves all evening, but by the time we got to the bottom of the stairs we'd had ten pints". Johnny, in turn, talks warmly of his old friend.

"He played and drank, played and drank, but he never lost his temper, never lost his smile and gave you 100 per cent every game. He was hard as iron, you know, and he had a wonderful reputation at Middlesbrough Football Club."

Once, he recalls, Tommy had wandered off on his own for a few beers, caught the bus to Osmotherley - getting on 20 miles south - and walked back over the fields.

"We were getting quite worried about him, thought we'd lost him for ever. He was a great character, Tommy."

After a season at Barnsley, he returned north to play for Blyth Spartans and then contentedly settled back in Witton Park, the former ironworks village where they'd send two bus loads, not to watch Middlesbrough but to watch Tommy Blenkinsopp. Until he was 65, he still helped train the Institute.

Jackie Foster, another Witton Park football legend, recalls a smashing feller. "He was always the same, Tommy. You always knew where you were with him, and he'd never hurt a fly."

Witton Park historian Dale Daniel bought a cigarette card of Tommy just three weeks ago. "His great loves were football, the village and a pint of beer, though I'm not sure in what order," he says.

 His illness was more likely the result of heading a ball than hitting the bar. Tommy would smile about it all: a little of what you fancy, he'd say, had never hurt a soul.