Bill Shankly was reluctant to break up the team that had brought so much success to the club in the middle of the 1960’s but a humiliating FA Cup quarter-final defeat to second division Watford proved to be Lawrence’s penultimate appearance in the Liverpool first team. Clemence, who had made his League debut at Nottingham Forest at the end of January 1970, was picked for the next League match after the cup exit. Lawrence knew that he would have to move to get first-team football again and made the short trip across the river Mersey at the age of 31 to join Tranmere Rovers, shortly to be joined by his old Liverpool skipper Ron Yeats. the deal, which saw Tranmere's promising keeper Frank Lane move in the other direction, was a loan one for the first three months. This was to allow for him to be recalled for European games as the deadline had passed for Lane to be registered as the substitute keeper. Lawrence's last involvement in a Liverpool squad was a 3-1 Cup Winners Cup defeat at Bayern Munich on 3rd November 1971. Lawrence added 80 Football League appearances to his total before moving on to non-league Chorley as player-coach. Twelve months later he returned to the Rylands wire factory in Warrington, where he'd worked as a youngster, as a quality controller until his retirement. He also helped out at local side Daten, where his son was a player and even filled in between the posts as an emergency despite being in his late forties. 

The stockily-built Scotsman was the first sweeper-keeper as Lawrence explains. "Shankly said: 'Right Tommy, you're not playing on the six yard line. When the ball's on the halfway line, you've got to be on the 18-yard line. If the ball shoots through, you've got to be out to kick it - a sort of stopper," Lawrence said. "At first I was frightened to death. We did it at Melwood a few times, then we tried at Anfield. Well, I'm standing there and the Kop is giving me some stick. 'Get back on your line!', they're all yelling. No goalkeeper did that in those days. I thought 'Oh my God'. But it worked. I'd come out and do like they do today. You didn't get sent off in those days either. So I used to bring them down. If they pushed it past me, I'd just hit them."

Lawrence shot back to fame in 2015 when he was approached by a BBC journalist in Liverpool's Church Street and asked if he remembered the Everton v Liverpool cup tie in 1967. After his astonishing response, that he played in it and Alan Ball scored the winner, the video was viewed over 8 million times online. He died on 9th January 2018 following a battle with cancer and dementia. A biography by Peter Kenny Jones, published in 2024 in collaboration with Lawrence's children and grandchildren, revealed that his retirement from playing had  hit him hard in the first few years leading to the break up of his marriage and repossession of his house.