Banksy
PENGUIN BOOKS
BANKSY
Gordon Banks OBE was born in Sheffield in 1937. Between 1955 and 1972 he played for Chesterfield, Leicester City and Stoke City. He was named Footballer of the Year in 1972. He made seventy-three appearances for England and was a member of the team that won the World Cup in 1966. He lives in the Midlands.
Banksy
My Autobiography
GORDON BANKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Michael Joseph 2002
Revised edition published in Penguin Books 2003
1
Copyright © Gordon Banks, 2002, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
978–0–141–03932–9
My autobiography is dedicated to my family – Ursula my wife and the love of my life; our children Robert, Julia and Wendy; and our grandchildren, Matthew, Edward, Daniel, Eleanor and Elizabeth.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
A Note to Les Scott
1. Family Matters
2. Aspiring Spireite
3. Learning My Trade
4. From Number Six to Number 1
5. Foxes in the Final
6. The Wembley Hoodoo?
7. Into Europe
8. England Calls
9. Down South America Way
10. Chelsea Blues
11. The Class of ’66
12. Rattin Gets Ratty
13. Alf’s Final Word
14. The Leaving of Leicester
15. Pelé and Me
16. Message in a Bottle
17. The Agony and the Ecstasy
18. Striking Back
19. The Changing Game
Career Record
Index
Illustrations
1. A Coronation street party in Ferrars Road.
2. Me, aged about nine.
3. Mam and Dad out walking in Sheffield.
4. Dad, on-course turf accounting at Doncaster.
5. Me at fourteen.
6. On holiday in Scarborough.
7. Mam and Our Jack at Scarborough.
8. In goal for Tinsley County Secondary School.
9. Tinsley Rec.
10. With the Royal Signals in Germany.
11. My debut for Leicester City reserves.
12. The 1961 FA Cup final.
13. During the big freeze of 1962–63.
14. The 1963 FA Cup semi-final against Liverpool.
15. My first game for England.
16. The flying Englishman.
17. The end of the semi-final against Liverpool.
18. Pepe’s ‘banana’ free kick.
19. Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly
20. Taking a high cross in the 1966 World Cup final.
21. The 1966 World Cup final: Wolfgang Weber’s equalizer.
22. A golden memory of a truly golden day.
23. ‘Give it here, Banksy.’
24. The boys of ’66.
25. England – World Champions.
26. Working hard to improve my technique.
27. Training with England.
28. Alf Ramsey.
29. Leicester City’s four home internationals.
30. Welcoming a young Peter Shilton to Filbert Street.
31. Mexico ’70.
32. The 1970 World Cup save from Pelé’s header.
33. The ball balloons over the bar to safety.
34. Organizing your defence.
35. In action for England against Scotland in 1971.
36. George Best about to pounce.
37. Pre-season training around the lanes of Cheshire.
38. My favourite photograph: saving Geoff Hurst’s penalty.
39. Stoke City’s victory over West Ham in the semi-final of the League Cup in 1972.
40. The League Cup Final of 1972.
41. George Eastham, the oldest recipient of a League Cup winner’s medal.
42. My son Robert puts me through my paces at our home in Madeley Heath.
43. Receiving my Footballer of the Year Award in 1972.
44. Still managing a smile after my near-fatal car crash.
45. My Ford Consul after the crash.
46. Ursula and Wendy sift through thousands of letters from well-wishers.
47. This is Your Life.
48. In action for Fort Lauderdale Strikers.
49. With George Best, in the colours of the Strikers.
50. Pelé visits Wembley prior to England’s last game there.
51. Working on the book with Les Scott.
PICTURE CREDITS
Empics, 12; 15; 22; 23; 27; 28; 35; 40; 41; Colorsport, 14; 17; 24; 26; 34; 36; 37; Getty Images, 16; 25; 43; 44; Popperfoto, 20; 21; 31; 33; J. C. Thompson & Co. Ltd, 29; Chris Morphet, 30; Sporting Pictures, 32; Sentinel Newspapers, 38; H. W. Kokowski, 42; Mirrorpix.com, 45; NI Syndication, 46; Steve Merzer, 48.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and we apologize in advance for any unintentional omission. We would be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent edition.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere thanks to the following people, all of whom have helped significantly in the production of my autobiography:
Julian Alexander and all at my literary agents Lucas Alexander Whitley; Barclays Bank plc, in particular Janice Hallam at Stafford; George and Alex Best; Ken and Jean Bolam; Chesterfield FC; Terry Conroy; Jimmy Greaves; Trevor Horwood; Roger Hunt; Sir Geoff Hurst; the staff of the Leicester Mercury; Leicester City FC, in particular club historians Dave Smith and Paul Taylor, authors of Of Fossils and Foxes; Simon Lowe; Manchester United plc, in particular Mike Maxfield; Jackie Marsh; Arthur Montford; Don Mackay; the staff of the Sheffield Star; Huston Spratt; Stoke City FC; Martin Taylor; Steve and Deborah Waterall; Rowland White and all at Michael Joseph.
For Sal, Lauren and Ruby.
A Note to Les Scott
My sincere thanks go to Les Scott for his invaluable assistance in writing this book. Les contributes regularly to the Stoke Sentinel and the Bristol Evening Post, has written extensively for TV and wrote the screenplay for the film The Rose Of Tralee.
He collaborated with George Best, Gareth Chilcott and Sir Stanley Matthews on their respective autobiographies, and when I made the decision to write my own I had no hesitation in aski
ng Les to lend a guiding hand.
Thanks, Les. It has been a privilege to work with you and great fun.
1. Family Matters
The mark of a good goalkeeper is how few saves he has to make during a game. A spectacular save is the last resort when all else – positioning, anticipation, defence – have failed. But saves are always what we are remembered for. There is one in my career that people always ask me about, it is seen as my greatest save – though not by me!
It was 1970 and England prepared to play Brazil in the World Cup, 1,500 metres above sea level under the relentless sun of Guadalajara. But the sweltering heat and lack of oxygen at such high altitude were the least of our concerns at the time. One man, bruised from Brazil’s defeat four years earlier when they failed even to reach the quarter-finals, and intimating this would be his last World Cup, was determined to make it a swansong to remember. This was a man who could single-handedly affect the outcome of a game at the highest level. He was, of course, Pelé.
In Brazil’s opening group match against a talented Czechoslovakian side, Pelé orchestrated the game from start to finish. Brazil won 4–1 and Pelé had been the hub around which every Brazilian move had turned. In that game he displayed a complete mastery of the ball, fantastic powers of acceleration, the cunning to veil his real intentions and the patience to bide his time before making his strike at the optimum moment. He kept the ball flowing, and his unselfishness brought his team mates into the picture time and again.
The England squad attended Brazil’s opening game. I watched Pelé with concealed awe: his finely tuned balance, his incredible skill on and off the ball, and his uncanny ability to ghost into the right position at the right time. Once he played the ball it was as if he disappeared into the ether. The Czechs were taken up with trying to close down Jairzinho or Tostao, then, as if springing from a trapdoor, Pelé would suddenly appear in their penalty area to display his predatory skills to the full. The Czechs tried to put two, sometimes three, men on him, but such was his skill and technique that he always found the space to make the telling pass. Knowing Brazil were our next opponents I had sat and watched Pelé closely. By the end of the game I didn’t think he was just a great player. I knew he was the great player. How could we stop him?
The opening ten minutes of England’s match against Brazil are best described as footballing chess, with both sides sounding each other out. Brazil adopted a softly, softly approach. Consummate passers of the ball, they played it around among themselves at walking pace. Such precise passing meant that there was little we could do but watch. In the stifling heat and high altitude, to play a chasing game and try to close them down would have been suicidal. So we bided our time.
Then, just when I thought the game was settling down to a rolling, strolling classic, it suddenly exploded into life. Carlos Alberto played the ball out to Jairzinho on the Brazilian right. Jairzinho was a powerful, direct winger who could go through the gears like Michael Schumacher and cross the ball with Swisswatch precision. I hit my toes as soon as I saw Jairzinho bearing down our left flank. We were caught on the hop. Bobby Moore had left Tostao free at the near post, Brian Labone was just outside our six-yard box, and Alan Mullery who had been pushing up, was sprinting back, anxiety creasing his face at the sight of Pelé heading towards our penalty box, unmarked.
When I saw Jairzinho arc around the ball, I knew the cross was coming. I moved two feet off my line, expecting him to cross to the penalty spot, in the belief that, since Pelé had now just entered our penalty area, I’d be first to the ball. Only Jairzinho didn’t aim for the penalty spot. He whipped the ball across to a point just outside my six-yard box, a yard or so in from my right-hand post.
As I turned my head I saw Pelé again. He’d made ground fast and such was the athleticism of the man, he’d already launched himself into the air. Sidestepping on my toes, I covered the ground to my right and was only two or three paces off the centre of goal when Pelé met that ball with the meat of his head. As an attacking header, it was textbook stuff. He rose above the ball and headed it hard and low towards my right-hand corner. The moment the ball left his head I heard Pelé shout, ‘Golo!’
Faced with a situation like that, your mind becomes clear. All your experience and technique takes over. The skills I had acquired through countless hours of practice and study had become what psychologists call ‘overlearned’, or, in layman’s terms, second nature. I suddenly found myself at a forty-degree angle with my right hand stretching out toward the post, my eyes trained on the quickly descending ball. One thing did flash through my mind: If I do make contact, I’ll not hold this. Instinct, over-learning, call it what you will – I knew that if I made contact with the ball, I had to get it up in the air. That way Pelé, following up, would not be afforded a tap-in at my expense. The ball hit the deck two yards in front of me. My immediate concern was how high it would bounce. It left the turf and headed toward my right-hand corner, but I managed to make contact with the finger of my gloved right hand. It was the first time I’d worn these particular gloves. I’d noticed that the Mexican and South American goalkeepers wore gloves that were larger than their British counterparts, with palms covered in dimpled rubber. I’d been so impressed with this innovation that I’d invested in two pairs. Those little rubber dimples did their stuff: the bouncing ball didn’t immediately glance off my hand and I was able to scoop it high into the air. But another thought flashed through my mind. In directing the ball upwards, I might only succeed in flicking it up into the roof of the net. So I rolled my right hand slightly, using the third and fourth fingers as leverage.
I landed crumpled against the inner side netting of the goal, and my first reaction was to look out at Pelé. I hadn’t a clue where the ball was. He’d ground to a halt, head clasped between his hands, and I knew then all that I needed to know. With the luck of the gods, the angle at which I’d managed to lift that ball was perfect, and it had ballooned in the air and over the bar, out of harm’s way for a corner.
As I got to my feet Pelé, ever the great sportsman, came up to me and patted me on the back.
‘I thought that was a goal,’ he said, smiling.
‘You and me both,’ I replied.
The TV footage of the game shows me laughing as I turn to take up my position for the corner. I was laughing at what Bobby Moore had just said to me.
‘You’re getting old, Banksy,’ he quipped, ‘you used to hold on to them.’
Like hell I did.
When the wind blew in the direction of our terraced house in Ferrars Road, it was the only time you never saw washing hanging out on the line. At the end of our street ran the main Sheffield to Rotherham road, on the opposite side of which stood Peach and Towser’s steelworks. The works stretched for nigh on a mile and a half and what I remember most about it was the smell: an acrid mix of fired coal, sulphur-tainted steam and human sweat. Even when the wind wasn’t blowing in our direction, the smell was ever present. When it did blow our way the washing was brought indoors because the cosy rows of terraced houses were immediately coated in a film of raven-black soot.
On such days I can recall drawing comic faces in the grime that coated our windowsills. Washing windows and paintwork was a constant job in the Tinsley area of Sheffield where I grew up. My mother seemed to spend half her life with a bucket of water and wash leather in her hands. But it was a thankless and never-ending task, like painting the Forth Bridge.
And when the soot descended it found its way inside every house no matter how tight the doors and windows were shut, and settled like a blanket over everything. This was part of Sheffield life in the 1940s. No one complained, least of all my mother. No one could remember it being any different. No one worried about the danger to health of this air pollution because we had never been told it was a problem. We lived in ignorant harmony with the smell and the soot, because they were simply the by-products of what everyone aspired to – work. My dad worked in a steel foundry. My mother, or so it appeared
to me, divided her time between cooking and washing. I was the youngest of their four sons, the others being David, Michael and John. John was always referred to as Jack, though in truth it was always ‘Our Jack’, a term of endearment that was always a source of bewilderment to me as a small boy, as I could never fathom why it was needed. ‘Our Jack has eaten all his cabbage,’ Mam would say, as if to identify which Jack she was talking about.
Dad didn’t earn much and, with six mouths to feed, money was always tight for us, as it was for all the other families in our neighbourhood. Tinsley folk may have been poor, but they were proud. I remember one Sunday lunchtime, a man from across the road appearing at his door to sharpen a carving knife on the front step, to try and make the rest of us believe they could afford a Sunday roast. He might have succeeded, too, had it not been for the incongruous smell of fish frying, as out of place on the street on a Sunday lunchtime as we children being allowed to play out. Fish was plentiful and cheap then, and that’s all the poorest could afford.
In the forties Tinsley families moved house rarely, if ever. Co-habiting for unmarried couples was unheard of. It was unheard of for couples to set up home together before they were married. That done, the vast majority stayed put until the time came for their children to call the funeral director. There were no nursing homes, no managed flats for the elderly. A house was bought or rented and turned into a home. At various times it was also a nursery (though we didn’t use the term ‘nursery’), a hospital, a function room and in the vast majority of cases, in the end, a chapel of rest for those who had purchased the house in the first place.
People occupied the same house for such a long time that it seemed to seep into their being, each home, internally and externally, taking on the character of its occupants. From either end of Ferrars Road the terraced houses all looked the same, but I soon learned the subtle individualities of each one. It was the owners’ small touches – usually the mother’s – that gave them their identities. The highly polished brass letter-box on the front door of the Coopers’; the pristine gold-leaf house number on the fanlight over the front door of the Dobsons’ (I had no idea why this number should have survived intact when all the others had become mottled and flaked with age); the net curtains in the front window of the Barbers’, gathered rather than hanging straight as in every other home; the red glass vase, no more than four inches high, that balanced precariously on the narrow window ledge in the Archers’ front window.