From Pele to Hurst, world’s best attacks were foiled by Banks
LONDON: It says much about the brilliance of Gordon Banks that the World Cup-winning England goalkeeper never rated his legendary save from Pele as the greatest stop of his glittering career.
Banks, who has died aged 81, earned his place in the pantheon of England icons when he flung himself to his right to turn Pele’s goal-bound header over the crossbar in the group stages of the 1970 World Cup.
Such was the accuracy and force of Pele’s effort that the Brazil great thought he had scored and was beginning to celebrate before being stopped in his tracks by Banks’s breathtaking intervention. “I heard Pele shout ‘Goal!’ after he headed it,” Banks said. “Definitely. He thought it was past me.” Banks’s England teammate Bobby Charlton echoed the feelings of the fans inside Guadalajara’s Estadio Jalisco and the millions who have seen the save since. “That is without question the greatest save I have ever seen,” said Charlton.
It was also a tribute to Banks’s diligence and attention.
Noticing the ball was bouncing higher than usual during practice on the sun-baked Mexican pitches, Banks adjusted his technique and his reward was football immortality. But, for the man himself, that save actually played second fiddle to a stop he made while playing for Stoke City on a dank evening in London’s East End. Asked in 2016 if denying Pele was his crowning glory, Banks replied: “No, that was a penalty (save) from Geoff Hurst against Stoke in the League Cup semi-final in 1972.”
Hurst though had already played a defining role in Banks’s career in 1966 when the striker’s hat-trick in a 4-2 victory against West Germany earned England the World Cup on home soil.
That golden afternoon at Wembley must have seemed unimaginable to Yorkshire-born Banks when he started his career with Chesterfield as a teenager while digging ditches and carrying bricks on a building site.
He made his name with Leicester City, where he won the League Cup in 1964, before joining Stoke in 1967. Making his England debut in 1963, Banks won 73 caps and was voted FIFA Goalkeeper of the Year six times before his international career came to an end when he lost the sight in his right eye in a car accident.
In later years, Banks twice battled cancer, but remained as active as possible as a Stoke life president. Banks eventually sold his World Cup winner’s medal to help his three children buy their first homes.
But while the tangible souvenirs faded, nothing will ever erase the memories of Banks’s greatness.