REAL The hands of God
He earned just £100-a-week, lost his eye in a car crash and was forced to sell his 1966 World Cup medal. But Gordon Banks, who’s died at 81, was an inspirational hero blessed with...
GORDON Banks, England’s 1966 World Cup-winning goalkeeper, died yesterday aged 81. Tributes were led by Pele – who Banks thwarted in 1970 by making ‘the greatest save ever’.
The Brazilian legend, 78, said: ‘I am glad he saved my header – because that act was the start of a friendship between us that I will always treasure.’
World Cup teammate Sir Geoff Hurst said: ‘Very sad to hear the news. One of the very greatest. Sad for football.’
Sir Bobby Charlton added: ‘Gordon was a fantastic goalkeeper and I was proud to call him a team-mate. He will be deeply missed.’ Ex-England goalkeeper Peter Shilton, who replaced Banks at Leicester City, tweeted: ‘I’m devastated – today I’ve lost my hero.’
Ray Clemence, who also kept goal for England, said: ‘Someone I looked up to and a great mentor. Definitely England’s greatest goalkeeper.’
Former Leicester City striker Gary Lineker said he was ‘an absolute hero of mine... such a lovely, lovely man’.
Even the German football team paid its respects, tweeting an image of him embracing German players after the 1966 final with the words: ‘A fierce opponent and a good man. Rest in peace, Gordon Banks.’
Seldom is a sportsman so supreme in his field that his name gives rise to an epigram that passes into common usage. one such was Gordon Banks, whose calm, and seemingly effortless ability to prevent a football from entering the net made him the finest goalkeeper that england, and perhaps the world, has seen.
during the summer of 1966, when he defied the planet’s finest strikers with the unfussy saves that became his trademark in helping england win the World Cup, the country was beset by an economic crisis with prime minister Harold Wilson introducing an emergency wage freeze.
Yet for a few heady weeks, the nation’s angst was eased by the fact that it had a goalie with a dependable pair of hands.
The high street banks may have wobbled, people would laugh, but nothing was safer than the redoubtable ‘Banks of england’.
It was a term that epitomised Banks, both on the pitch and off, and continued to be heard long after his career was cruelly curtailed shortly before his 34th birthday in 1972, when he lost the sight in his right eye in a car crash.
How ironic that his death at 81, after a dignified struggle with kidney cancer, was announced just after the news that another British footballer, Aaron Ramsey, had signed a £400,000-a-week contract with Italian club Juventus – and he hasn’t even played at a World Cup.
For despite his surname, Banks belonged to a breed who played the game for love, not money.
even at the height of his career he never earned more than £100 a week, and his reward for helping england beat West Germany at Wembley on July 30, 1966, was £1,000, plus a standard £60 appearance fee and a new raincoat, donated by a london tailor.
Combined with various misfortunes that beset his post-football business career, he had to auction his World Cup winner’s medal for £124,750, and the cap he was awarded for the game for £27,025.
Banks, so proud to represent his country that he said he would have gladly turned out for nothing, was reluctant to sell such mementos but did so to help his three children. Several other 1966 teammates were pressed into selling their treasures.
NOR was Banks alone in being overlooked when major gongs were handed out. Though made an OBE four years after the World Cup victory, quite why he wasn’t deemed worthy of a knighthood remains a mystery.
After all, he was voted the world’s top goalkeeper by FIFA for six consecutive years between 1966 and 1971, and is considered to have pulled off the greatest save ever, during a World Cup match against Brazil, in mexico, in 1970.
So certain was Pele that he had scored, he shouted ‘gol’. Yet he hadn’t reckoned on england’s own genius, who jack-knifed downwards, extended his arm like a periscope, and used his little finger to scoop the ball over the bar.
Pele led the applause and in the eyes of football’s cognoscenti, that moment of gravity- defying brilliance elevated Banks to be the greatest goalie of all time.
To football fans of my generation (I was ten in 1966), Banks was the keeper who made goalies glamorous. Until we saw his heroics, none of us volunteered to go in goal.
If his achievements on the pitch weren’t sufficient for a knighthood, his many admirers argued, then why not make the award for his charity work? In his later years, he worked for an Alzheimer’s charity, worried that his england teammates Nobby Stiles, martin Peters and Ray Wilson had contracted the disease by repeatedly heading heavy leather footballs.
on the 50th anniversary of england’s World Cup triumph, he admitted feeling hurt that knighthoods had been awarded to only two of the eleven, Geoff Hurst and Bobby Charlton. While not begrudging these accolades, he said it ‘seemed unfair’ to single anyone out when football was a team game. His frustration was the more understandable given his humble beginnings.
The son of a foundry worker, he was raised in a two- up, two- down terraced house in the Sheffield suburb of Tinsley, with three brothers, the eldest of whom was disabled by bone-disease, and died at 34. Watching his brother face up to his illness with cheerful resolution shaped Banks’s life, he said, teaching him to accept every adversity and ‘just crack on’.
like most boys, he adored football, but his ambition to play professionally was stirred when the only family in his street with a TV set invited him to watch a night match. He was mesmerised by the floodlights and the sight of the white- coloured ball.
leaving school at 15, however, he earned £3 a week bagging coal, then became a bricklayer.
His break came when he went to watch a steelworks team whose goalie failed to turn up. Invited to stand in, he dashed home to grab his boots and a pair of work trousers which he tucked into his socks. He did well enough to be picked for the team’s next match – but facing better opposition, he let in 12 goals.
Nonetheless, by the end of the season he’d been scouted by Football league team Chesterfield and signed a contract in 1959. The following season he was sold to leicester City.
In 1963, he won the first of his 73 england caps. manager Alf Ramsey said he was ‘the best goalkeeper I have ever seen’. Inevitably, he was Ramsey’s first name on the team sheet. He played every match in the 1966 World Cup, and his wife Ursula cheered him on during the final even though she was German.
Banks had been stationed in Germany on National Service with the Royal Signals and had met her while buying a shirt in the shop
where she worked. After receiving his winner’s medal from the Queen, he and Ursula returned to their rented semi in Leicester. Their car was a modest Standard Eight, the sort a low-grade rep might drive.
If England’s No 1 thought World Cup victory would change his fortunes, he was sorely mistaken.
There was no homecoming parade – just a small reception at the town hall. No lucrative commercial offers or endorsements, though he did some adverts for a sweater company. No pay rise from Leicester City either – within nine months, the 28-year-old had been replaced by teenage prodigy Peter Shilton and sold to Stoke City, where there is now a statue in his honour.
‘I’m not exaggerating, but afterwards everything was normal. Back to business. I don’t think we realised the magnitude of the World Cup and what it meant to the people of the country until several years later,’ he recalled.
Football experts believe England would have retained the cup in Mexico in 1970 if Banks had been in goal for their quarter- final, against West Germany again.
Hours before the game, he was taken ill with a virulent stomach bug. Since he’d eaten the same food as the other players, none of whom was sick, there was speculation he was deliberately poisoned – a theory Banks subscribed to.
Attempts to get him fit by feeding him scrambled egg and sweet tea failed, and he was replaced by Peter Bonetti, whose nervous errors condemned England to a 3-2 defeat.
In October 1972, Banks was still England’s first-choice goalkeeper when catastrophe struck. Overtaking a car on a bend, his Ford Consul struck a van, head-on, and his head hit the windscreen with such force that it shattered the glass.
Lying in the wreckage, his right eye blinded by shards of glass, he knew his career was in jeopardy. Yet, typically, his thoughts were with a little boy in the van. “I could hear him crying but luckily for me he wasn’t hurt. I couldn’t see, but I was relieved to hear that,” he would say, admonishing himself for causing the accident.
WITH surgeons unable to save his sight, Banks’ bigtime goalkeeping days were over, though with just one good eye he was talented enough to make a comeback, playing a season for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the US.
Surprisingly, he didn’t get a wellpaid career as a specialist coach. After a couple of lowly posts managing youth teams, he was appointed manager of non-league Telford United.
Although his results were good, his laconic style apparently didn’t suit the club’s bosses and he was sacked. His final humiliation had come when the club ordered him to sell lottery tickets in a local supermarket. Banks said he ‘naively’ complied, believing he would have breached his contract had he refused.
So, aged only 40 and bitterly disillusioned, the goalie whose agility had made Pele gawp in disbelief drifted out of football.
He became ill-advisedly involved with several flawed business ventures, including the promotion of a dubious car- dealing company, before earning a comfortable living by consultancy work, after-dinner speaking and serving on the Football Pools Panel (which predicted the scores of postponed matches).
It enabled him to ‘keep my head above water’, as he put it. He and Ursula lived happily in the Staffordshire village of Madeley – in a house filled with footballing memorabilia and photos, though not, alas, his World Cup medal – where they were visited by their three children and grandchildren.
Having lost one kidney 14 years ago, Banks was discovered to have cancer in the other. The illness, and his chemotherapy treatment, made it painful for him to walk, yet he faced his plight with typical fortitude, tending to his garden and continuing to play golf with the use of a buggy.
For many years, he attended gettogethers with the team of 66. He is the fourth to die, after Bobby Moore in 1993, Alan Ball in 2007 and Ray Wilson last year.
He enjoyed reminiscing with his old Stoke teammates – who would address him as ‘Sir Gordon’ in recognition of the honour he ought to have received.
Among his most regular callers was former captain Dennis Smith, who visited on Sunday.
‘The world has lost one of the great players and we have lost a great friend. A true gent,’ Smith said yesterday.
‘Worldwide, they knew him. You could go to Africa, Russia, Australia, wherever, and they all knew Gordon Banks. Even the youngsters.’
Indeed they did, for there will never be another Banks of England. He was the gold standard.