Giant of game remembered for 1966 and that Pele save
IN his 2002 autobiography, Gordon Banks, the only English goalkeeper in history with a World Cup winners’ medal, recalls why, when he climbed to his feet after that wondrous save from Pele at the 1970 World Cup, he did so with a chuckle.
“I was laughing at what Bobby Moore had just said to me,” Banks would write years later of his most famous save.“‘You’re getting old, Banksy,’ Bobby quipped. ‘You used to hold on to them.’”
Banks, one of England’s boys of 1966, died yesterday as a consequence of kidney cancer, at the age of 81. He is the fourth of the XI who won the World Cup more than 52 years ago to pass away, and his death precipitated an outpouring of sadness and nostalgia across the game, including by the great Pele himself.
Banks’s life will be remembered for that wondrous save, perhaps even more than for anything he did four years earlier when England won the World Cup, but his career was a lot more than that.
Growing up in Sheffield, the son of a steelworker and the youngest of four brothers his was an unusual post-war career. He was voted the second greatest goalkeeper of the 20th century, behind Lev Yashin, yet he never played for any of the great clubs of the era, and alongside his World Cup winners’ medal were just two League Cups, won eight years apart with Leicester City and Stoke City.
When the loss of sight in his right eye in a car accident in October 1972 forced his early retirement the following summer at the age of 34, Banks’s club career in terms of domestic trophies had been one of many near-misses. He played in FA Cup finals with Leicester in 1961 and
1963, losing both before he was sold in 1967 to make way for Peter Shilton.
Banks made 510 league appearances for Chesterfield, Leicester and Stoke but it was on the international stage that Banks established himself as a star.
It was part of Banks’s preparation to chew sugar-coated Beech-Nut gum and spit onto the palms of his gloves to make them sticky. When Harold Shepherdson, Alf Ramsey’s assistant, forgot
the gum before the 1966 semi-final against Portugal, Shepherdson had to run the length of Wembley Way in the minutes before kick-off to buy some from a late-opening newsagent.
The penalty Eusebio scored was the first Banks had conceded in the tournament. There would be two more in the final, but England went on to win the World Cup. Banks returned to Leicester as the game’s pre-eminent goalkeeper. A year later, at 29, he was told by manager Matt Gillies his best days were behind him and was transfer-listed. Bill Shankly told Banks later he had tried to buy him, but had been denied the funds by a Liverpool board who felt £50,000 was too much for a keeper.
At Stoke, Banks made a new life and settled there after football. They went on to win the 1972 League Cup, which remains the club’s only major honour.
His performance in the semi-final against West Ham was regarded as one of his best. The 1970 World Cup may have been different for England had he not fallen ill before the quarter-final tie with West Germany. Assailed by a serious stomach complaint, he was replaced by Peter Bonetti, whose errors were costly.
Collision
On October 22, 1972, Banks was driving home from treatment at the Victoria Ground when he overtook a car on a country road in his Ford Consul. In the collision that followed, the windscreen perforated his right eye and he required more than 100 microstitches in the retina and socket.
It was days later, when he reached for a cup of tea on his bedside table and grasped thin air that, at 34, he realised he could never play again at the top level. He did briefly come out of retirement to play in the United States. His management career at Port Vale and Telford United was largely unhappy.
Later he ran a hospitality business in Leicester but it was Stoke to whom he felt the strongest connection, where a statue depicting him lifting the World Cup was unveiled years later, and who announced, yesterday, the passing of another giant of English football. (© Daily Telegraph, London)