At the heart of football Club bosses’ contempt for Banks & Co shows the good ol’ days weren’t so good after all
ANOTHER loss, another genuine outpouring of love for someone that gave the people who watched football so many warm memories.
It’s what you’d expect when a man from the class of ’66, such as Gordon Banks, dies. Along with the comparisons of how in football’s good old days, usually defined as the pre-sky era, everything was so much better.
In many ways it was. Especially when you compare the down-toearth humility of a World Cup winner like Banks with the entitled attitude some of today’s players, who have yet to win an international cap, or look at how the obsession with money has priced so many traditional fans out of our stadiums.
But we shouldn’t let the rosetinted glasses blind us. Clubs treated many players of Banks’ generation abysmally, brutally discarding them when they felt they’d had their pound of flesh.
Banks himself was shocked and angry when Leicester told him he was being sold a year after winning the World Cup.
And English football shamefully ignored an even greater icon, Bobby Moore, in the years before his death at 51.
It’s why many had to flog their precious medals.
As for the treatment of fans, well, anyone jammed into those Victorian slum terraces will disabuse you of the notion that clubs and authorities cared for the welfare of their paying customers. It is maybe difficult at times to see, but modern football shows more respect to its people than it is given credit for.
Look at how Crystal Palace turned their stadium into a homeless shelter or at some of the excellent work that clubs are doing in their community, in local schools and prisons.
Look at the way Cardiff City handled the recent death of Emiliano Sala, despite him being someone who they never got to know. A major part of that is down to clubs being made to listen to supporters, who have become more organised and empowered.
And the greater truth, which often gets lost in the poisonous hatred spilled on social media, is that the vast majority of modern fans are decent people who care.
Twitter is fertile ground for the sick and ignorant, which is why so many attach themselves to football and spew violent abuse.
It’s a sickness that’s crept back with the re-emergence of anti-semitic chants and players being racially abused.
We even had two Southampton fans mocking the death of Sala days after his body was identified, by making plane gestures. But the scale is not the same as the days so fondly remembered, when large parts of entire terraces would make monkey-grunts and sing about footballers dying on a runway.
The real spirit of the modern fan could be seen over the past fortnight – laying a different scarf to Stoke’s at the Gordon Banks statue; contributing to food banks at grounds; crowd-funding to search for Sala’s body; raising £11,000 in a bar to help the rehabilitation of Sean Cox after his horrific attack outside Anfield or contributing to Mickey Thomas’ Gofundme appeal.
Here’s someone who was playing for Wrexham when Banks was named Footballer of the Year in 1972, who has been diagnosed with cancer, but has no money to fight it.
Earlier this week, a target of £20,000 was set, which has nearly been reached, leaving Thomas to say he’s been “blown away by the love, kindness and support” of fans from many different clubs.
Football has become a game of wild contradictions, where the worst aspects of human behaviour are magnified and used as evidence against it.
That didn’t occur in Banks’ era, which partly explains why it’s still recalled as the good old days.
But look past the greed from some, who play and run the game, and the hate from a minority, who attach themselves to it, and the goodness is still there in spades.