The brothers of ’66 came to say thanks to Sir Gordon the People’s Knight
IAN HERBERT’S MOVING TRIBUTE
Gordon Banks was always a man of quite sublime symmetry and things were no different on the day they laid him to rest.
It was the 47th anniversary of the Wembley final in which his command role helped stoke City lift the League Cup — still their only silverware.
His death has taken away the crusading zeal of Banks’s work to fight alzheimer’s, which has afflicted so many of his brothers of ’66 as well as his mother.
no longer will he be in the number of former stoke players who meet each Tuesday to walk around the city’s Trentham Lake. They will go on without him in what they have decided will become their ‘ Gordon Banks walk’.
But the day of remembrance was filled with laughter and memory, more than grief. sir Geoff Hurst remembered the night, away with England, when a piano player at their restaurant played so loudly, with microphone turned up, that the players could not hear themselves speak.
‘ do you do tunes?’ Banks approached him to ask.
‘What would you like?’ replied the pianist.
‘Can you play far away?’ Banks replied.
Banks was a better exponent of deadpan humour than was generally appreciated, Hurst reflected. one of his lines in a dinner event they’d done together had always stayed with him.
‘I’ve broken most bones in my fingers, thumbs, wrists,’ Banks had said. ‘My knuckle disappeared in 1968, I’ve had a hip replacement and I’m blind in one eye. Yet I still get some idiot come up to me and say: do I still play?’
Hurst’s memories and his precise articulation of them are precious because the boys of ’66 are old men now, many of them struggling. Just four — Jack and sir Bobby Charlton, roger Hunt and Hurst — were well enough to be in stoke Minster to bid their old friend a last farewell. Jack Charlton does not look in the best of health.
In many ways, Banks has been a low-key member of that legendary number, while others took greater acclaim. It is the same at stoke’s ground, where the vast sir stanley Matthews banqueting suite is adorned with six cabinet displays to the club’s most beloved son.
The Gordon Banks suite is far smaller, with wall space for half a dozen images, including two of the man in question out on the club’s old Victoria Ground mud, with no goalkeeping gloves for protection.
There never was a knighthood for r Banks, of course, e, although scores of the messages inked ked on to flags and shirts ts at the overflowing memobet365 memorial to him at the bet365 stadium expressed d thanks to ‘sir Gordon’. He was ‘the People’s knight’, someone omeone said.
In the three weeks ks since his passing, passa far fuller sense of the man has come to light. The save from Pele was only a fragment. a congregation including former stoke team-mate George Eastham, who had flown in from south africa, and fellow goalkeepers Pat Jennings, Peter shilton, ray Clemence, Joe Corrigan and alex stepney heard how Banks kept football in its true perspective.
He was the bookmaker’s son from Tinsley, sheffield, whose first job was bagging coal. He had been a brickie’s hod-carrier before the game found him. He never turned a supporter away.
don Mullan, the Irish documentary-maker and author of the touching boyhood memoir Gordon Banks — A Hero Who Could Fly, recalled his first encounter with him in Jackson’s Hotel, donegal, in the early 1970s when stoke were in town for a pre-season friendly.
Mullan’s father had made nervous inquiries as to whether the World Cup winner would perhaps
have time to sign the boy’s Banks scrapbook. The anxiety was not necessary.
‘It was his gentle courtesy and respect to my mother and father I remember,’ related Mullan.
Hurst said: ‘He was a superstar on the field but, quite frankly, off the field he was not. There were no airs and graces. That was one of the beautiful things about Banksy.’
The humility took nothing away from his competitive instinct. ‘There was something about those ’66 guys and Gordon was no exception,’ Shilton has said. ‘He could get angry on the pitch. I saw him doing that.’
Hurst also recalled the look in Banks’s eyes as the striker prepared to take a crucial spotkick against him for West Ham in the semi-final of the 1972 League Cup, which Stoke went on to win. Banks kept out the penalty. The save he made in the ensuing final against Chelsea — springing out of his area to block-tackle Chris Garland, who had been let in by Micky Bernard’s back-pass — was playing on continuous loop on the bet365 Stadium concourse screens yesterday.
Banks was certainly aware of his value. Stoke signed him in 1967 after Leicester had refused him a loyalty payment of £2,000 and put a fee of £50,000 on his head. He refused to move until the bonus had been paid, probably by Stoke. He lived in his adoptive city for the rest of his days.
Stoke keeper Jack Butland reflected on how Banks ‘ always wanted to know more about you’ when they talked together.
‘He was selfless,’ said Butland. ‘He considered me a friend and when someone of that ilk wants to know about you, that is incredible. It sets something off in you.’
The four pall-bearers yesterday were current goalkeepers representing the sides Banks graced — Stoke’s Butland, Leicester’s Kasper Schmeichel, England’s Joe Hart and Joe Anyon of Chesterfield, where he began his career.
The full force of the Stoke climate was felt through the day, although a brilliant sunshine illuminated the bet365 Stadium as the funeral cortege pulled away.
His daughter Wendy recalled a conversation with her father as they’d driven home from one of his many chemotherapy sessions. ‘He told me, “I’ve had a great life and I’ve no regrets”,’ she said. ‘He said “I’ve done a job I’ve loved and I’d have done it for free. But don’t tell them I said that!”’