“Better than Gazza” – Comparison emerges about ex-Nottingham Forest and Middlesbrough man | OneFootball

Lee Tomlin recently announced his retirement from professional football, partly due to injury and also the trajectory of his career in the last couple of seasons.

Tomlin is still only 33, but he packed a lot into his career, dazzling supporters of different clubs with his technical ability in the final third.

The versatile forward did grace the Premier League with Bournemouth and went on to represent clubs of the size of Nottingham Forest, Middlesbrough, Cardiff City and Bristol City, after making his way into the professional game the hard way, dropping into non-league with Rushden and Diamonds.

Tomlin was at Leicester City as a youth player but made his name in senior football at Rushden and Diamonds, before being picked up by Peterborough United in the EFL.

Tomlin’s technical ability regularly produced jaw-dropping moments, and he once received very high praise from the late Justin Edinburgh, who was his manager at Rushden and Diamonds.

The 33-year-old revealed the story when he appeared on The Official EFL Podcast.

He said: “I remember Darren Ferguson saying to me, his dad (Sir Alex Ferguson) had said that I was one of the best technical players he’d seen, and I was just like ‘yeah, yeah, okay, whatever’.

“Justin Edinburgh said to me, years ago, bless him, rest in peace, when he was the manager at Rushden and Diamonds, he said to me: ‘if you were playing 20 years ago, before your time now, when he was at Spurs with Gazza (Paul Gascoigne), you are better than Gazza.’

“And I was like ‘What!?’, he was like ‘you are better than Gazza.'”

“Even when I left and he went to Newport, he still said to me, ‘I’m telling the truth, you’re technically better than Gazza just the way you are, the way you look after yourself, you would’ve been a lot, lot better back then.'”

It is clear to see why the comparison with Gascoigne has been made, with the ability on the ball that Tomlin had, and how he could seemingly grab a game by the scruff of the neck and produce a moment of brilliance to decide it.

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Tomlin will be missed as an entertaining character in the EFL, but his highlights reel will remain as will the memories of his performances in the minds of supporters.