by Gordon Banks
In the sixth round a crowd of 39,000 saw us bow out of the FA Cup against Wolverhampton Wanderers. It turned out to be a classic quarter-final, full of cut and thrust. Peter Broadbent put Wolves ahead only for Tommy McDonald to equalize. Len Chalmers, two years older than me at twenty-four, had recently been appointed captain. Len played exceptionally well that day but towards the end of the game couldn’t get out of the way of a low centre and deflected the ball past me and into the net. In the dressing room after the game Len was inconsolable. I told him, ‘It’s gone now, Len, so forget it. Next season, luck’ll probably be on your side in the Cup.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Wolves went on to win the FA Cup that season, beating Blackburn Rovers 3–0, though they were denied a third consecutive League Championship when Burnley pipped them on the very last day – the first time that the Clarets had topped the table all season. Burnley’s success was a triumph for the attacking football that was still very much in vogue in 1960 as evidenced by Wolves’ goal tally of 100-plus for the third successive season. We played Burnley twice towards the end of the season when they really had their tails up and the league title within their reach. We lost by the only goal at Turf Moor, but dented their progress by winning 2–1 at Filbert Street. Our good form in the second half of the season and the fact that we had beaten the eventual champions at home and had given them a very close game on their own turf, made me believe Leicester could go on to bigger and better things the following season. I wasn’t wrong.
As I have said, the emphasis was still very much on scoring goals rather than conceding them. The fact that the best club side in the world, Real Madrid, were an all-out attacking side fuelled the general notion that there was nothing wrong in conceding three or four goals as long as you scored five or six. In the case of Real Madrid, more.
The maximum wage a player in the Football League could earn at this time was £20. On making the first team at Leicester City my wage had been increased from £15 to £17, which on establishing myself in the Leicester team, was increased to £20 less tax. My new found ‘wealth’ enabled Ursula and I to buy one or two home comforts, one being a television. What televisions there were available in the shops in 1959–60 all seemed to be British made, Bush, Ferguson, Ekco and Ultra. We chose an Ultra, black and white of course with a fourteen-inch screen. For many people, ourselves included, television was still a novelty and the technology nowhere near that of today. When the cathode ray tube blew, as they often did in those days, replacement was so costly that many people when buying a TV set took out insurance to cover the cost.
I watched the 1960 European Cup final on our little black and white Ultra and marvelled at the skill and technique of Real Madrid. All these years on, I still believe Real’s performance in that final to be the greatest ever performance, by the greatest ever club side, the world has ever seen. Real beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7–3 and the performances of Alfredo di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas were sublime.
Looking at the margin of Real’s victory, one might think Frankfurt were simply a team of journeymen who ran up against a very good side. The truth was that Eintracht Frankfurt were a very good side up against a brilliant one. To put Frankfurt into perspective, Glasgow Rangers were considered to be one of the best teams in Britain at that time. In the two-legged semi-final Frankfurt beat Rangers 6–1 in Germany and 6–3 at I brox! For Frankfurt then to concede seven in the final says volumes for how far ahead of every other team Real were. True, Frankfurt scored three, but they were outclassed and outplayed for long periods of the game and the final result was never in doubt from the moment Di Stefano pulled back Richard Kress’s opening goal for the Germans.
The European Cup was just starting to take off as a competition. The victory over Frankfurt was Real Madrid’s fifth consecutive European Cup success since its inauguration in 1955–56. As a team Real were peerless and their passing, movement off the ball, vision and finishing in and around the penalty box were breathtaking. Everyone else who watched that final was in awe of them.
It was generally felt that Spanish and Italian football was superior to our domestic game. But Real Madrid were streets ahead of any other Spanish team of the day. The football they played seemed to be from another planet. Following that European Cup final I spoke to quite a number of my fellow players and the consensus of opinion was that Real had created a benchmark for us all to aspire to. We knew that, in all probability, we would never reach the sublime level of football displayed by Real that night, either as individuals or as a team, but at least we now knew what was possible. I don’t think any club side has ever equalled the performance of Real that night, but many of the great individual and team performances we have seen since, in part, came about through people trying to equal the standard as laid down by Di Stefano, Puskas and company.
Since 1953 when Hungary beat England 6–3 at Wembley, the first foreign team ever to win on English soil, and less than a year later followed up that victory with a 7–1 demolition of England in Budapest, we had known that, in International terms, our football was no longer the best in the world. Real Madrid’s domination of European club football merely underlined the point. The success of Real, and the manner of it, woke English football from its long slumber that had been remarkably undisturbed by the watershed defeats at the hands of the Hungarians. Following the 1960 European Cup final, more clubs started to appoint coaches. They realized individual skill and effort was no longer enough, there also had to be collective effort. The FA’s coaching school at Lilleshall took on far greater importance and many current and former players attended their courses with a view to learning more about the tactical side of the game and the development of skills and technique.
These coaching schools were under the supervision of Walter Winterbottom, the England manager who also bore the title of Chief of the Football Association’s Coaching Staff. Walter was a deep-thinking football man, always more at home with the coaching side of his job than the actual management of teams. The FA and Walter made a great effort to encourage former players, and some current ones, to take up what was then a three-part course leading to full qualification as an FA coach. Following the 1960 European Cup Final, the FA’s Coaching Course was fully subscribed and many of those who embarked upon the course would go on to make telling contributions to our game. Jimmy Adamson, Tony Barton, Tommy Docherty, Frank O’Farrell, Bob Paisley and Dave Sexton were all on the same coaching course. They and many others played no small part in changing the way we played the game. Another member of the Class of 1960–61 was Bert Johnson, the chief scout at Leicester City, who Matt Gillies later appointed as first-team coach and whose expertise and enthusiasm was to play a significant part in my development as a goalkeeper.
English football may well have been embarking upon a renaissance but there was still an insular attitude prevalent in a number of people charged with running the game. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had all declined to enter the inaugural European Nations Cup, which was won by the USSR. The four respective FAs shunned this new tournament, believing the Home International tournament to be of greater importance. While it is true to say the European Nations Cup had nowhere near the status and kudos of today’s European Championship, the fact that we had declined to compete with other European international teams on a competitive basis could only hinder, rather than help, the seeds of progress.
One of the changes that took place in football at this time concerned the strips. Many teams rejected the thick cotton, collared shirts with their buttoned fronts and cuffs in favour of lightweight V-necked shirts with short sleeves. Stanley Matthews, ever the innovator, and Tom Finney had returned from the 1950 World Cup impressed with the lightweight strips worn by South American teams such as Brazil and Uruguay but their suggestions that English clubs should adopt them fell on deaf ears. Three years later Hungary turned up at Wembley wearing similar lightweight shirts, but it took a few more years before English clubs finally saw the benefits to
be had from wearing this new type of strip and adopted the style.
The first team to wear these lightweight V-necked shirts in an FA Cup final were Manchester City in 1955 against Newcastle United. In the following year’s final against Birmingham City the Mancunians repeated the experiment, this time in their change strip to avoid a colour clash, while Birmingham stuck with the traditional collar and cuff shirts that had been de rigueur for teams since the early thirties.
In 1956 the England team adopted the new style of shirt, though many clubs were slow to take to what was not so much a new fashion as a more practical form of kit. At Chesterfield we had worn the old-style thick cotton collared shirts. Leicester City, however, had made the switch a couple of years before my arrival at the club in 1959.
The significance of this innovation in kit design was that it spearheaded a change of attitude across many aspects of the game at the time. Every aspect of a footballer’s kit changed. Shorts became, well, shorter and less restrictive to movement. Not only that, the heavy cotton from which shorts had been made since the Victorian age was superseded by nylon. In keeping with the new style of shirt and shorts, the woollen stockings players had worn for decades were replaced by lightweight cotton designs. Boots also became lighter and lower slung. The reinforced toecap was committed to history as was the steel plate that used to form part of the sole. These changes even affected the way a player laced his boots. The old reinforced boot had a loop at the back of the heel through which the lace was threaded. This was now considered a potential danger to ankles and gradually was dropped by the boot manufacturers. Players now preferred to lace up their boots by wrapping the lace over the upper foot and under the instep rather than bind it around the ankle.
The new lightweight strips were not just symbolic of a game keen to modernize. Nor were they the subject of any commercial or marketing strategy – such things did not exist in football at the time. They were simply more practical athletic solutions, in an era when players were becoming increasingly aware of the need to be more professional and dedicated in every aspect of the game. The fabric of football, quite literally, was changing.
The dawn of the sixties, then, was a time of enormous change in football. Across every aspect of society people’s lives were changing. Material comfort and opportunity was increasing. Yet in the north and midlands that I knew, at least, memories were still fresh of depression, war, rationing and shortages. People saved up for things. For instance, when Ursula and I got married, like many young couples of the day we set up home with what bits of furniture we had been given by relatives. Because Ursula had come over from war-shattered Germany, any furniture and other home comforts we acquired had to come from my family and, though we were grateful for what we received, there wasn’t a great deal of it.
Today young couples setting up home have considerable aspirations. The vast majority seem to aspire to a middle-class lifestyle from the outset and, if their savings don’t run to furnishing their home as they had planned themselves, they think nothing of buying the rest on store or credit cards. Ursula and I set up home in 1959 and, like many other couples, we were petrified at the thought of immersing ourselves in credit. As part of a working-class family in the forties and fifties, I was brought up to look upon credit with a combination of deep mistrust and abhorrence. It was not so much the stigma of taking out credit, more that people felt they would lose face if they were beholden to more people than was absolutely necessary.
People were beholden to the local steelworks or pit for their livelihood; to a building society or rent man for the roof over their heads; for their spiritual fulfilment, people were beholden to God – or else to Sheffield Wednesday or United. To be beholden also to a ‘tick book’ (a record of hire-purchase payments) to acquire possessions within the home, was considered unbecoming for working folk who saw paying cash as a mark of integrity, honesty and the inbred illusion of financial independence. Tinsley folk would rather make do and mend, rely on hand-me-downs from relatives, or simply go without rather than sign up for what Dad called the ‘never-never’. The phrase ‘never-never’ indicated how we viewed credit: once you succumbed to the temptation of credit, you would never be rid of it. To spend money you didn’t have was a fantasy, contrasting with the reality of the daily toil of work, which everyone knew would eventually lead to retirement and days pottering around an allotment. Life was difficult enough with monthly repayments to be found for the building society; to commit oneself to further borrowing was seen as plain madness.
Of course people’s expectations were nowhere near as high as they are today. The labour-saving devices of the consumer revolution had yet to sweep Britain and as Mam often said, ‘What you never had, you never miss.’ Likewise, what others didn’t have, you never yearned for. Hence, no credit.
My marriage to Ursula had more or less coincided with my elevation to the Chesterfield first team. We bought a semidetached house in Treeton for £1,100 but my transfer to Leicester came soon after. In fact, so short a time did we spend in that house that when we sold it we actually owed more to the building society than we had actually borrowed.
Money had been tight during my time with Chesterfield, but in the summer of 1959 we had saved enough for our first holiday. A week at Butlin’s in Skegness was hardly the sort of holiday professional footballers opt for these days, but in relative terms, I was lucky. Many of my Chesterfield team mates, like so many other players of the time, were forced to take on a summer job in the close season to supplement their income.
When signing for Leicester City, we moved into a club house formerly occupied by Arthur Rowley, whose career total of 434 league goals remains a record to this day, a record that, I should imagine, will never be beaten.
Our new home was a semi-detached house in Kirkland Road, Braunceston. Ursula and I immediately felt very much at home there, though at times we felt like two peas in a drum. This house was much larger than our first home in Treeton and once we had moved in what furniture we possessed – still the hand-me-downs from my family – we were immediately struck by a feeling of open space. We didn’t have a three-piece suite. All we had were two armchairs, one red, one blue, that we had bought when seeing them advertised in the small ads in the Sheffield Star. At night we’d watch the television or listen to the wireless, sitting either side of a small marble-tiled fireplace like two bookends. We were gloriously happy. I had found the love of my life. We were ensconced in our own spacious home. I was doing the only thing I wanted to do in life, play football, and was being paid to do so. Life was great. I couldn’t believe it could get much better than this.
4. From Number Six to Number 1
Apart from the considerable thrill of having established myself as Leicester’s first-choice goalkeeper, the events surrounding my first season at Filbert Street had not been remarkable. All was to change, however. In 1960–61 Leicester embarked upon one of the most notable seasons in their history and football was rarely out of the headlines as a result of events both on and off the pitch.
When I reported back for pre-season training, revolution against the maximum wage was in the air. Fuelled by newsletters from the players’ union, the Professional Footballers’ Association, many of us debated the rights and wrongs of resorting to strike action in order to free ourselves from contracts that bound us to a club for life and put a ceiling on what we could earn.
Nationwide, supporters too were grumbling. During the close season the Football League had announced that admission prices for adults were to rise to a minimum of 2s. 6d. (12½p). Following the post-war boom when total annual crowds were in excess of 40 million, attendances had been in gradual decline and many supporters believed the increased admission price would only make matters worse. (They were right: 1960–61 saw attendances fall to 28.6 million from 32.5 million the previous season.)
There was discontent in the media, too. While it was widely agreed that English club football had fallen way behind the standard set by the top European si
des, a few journalists launched critical attacks on the England team’s performances on the international scene. Why, supporters argued, should we be expected to pay more for an inferior product? One particularly stinging attack came from the former Bolton and England centre forward turned football writer, David Jack. Discussing the previous summer’s four-game tour during which England managed only a single win against the USA, Jack called for ‘drastic changes’ at the top if we wish to compete with the great football nations of the world.
Jack was just getting up a head of steam. ‘The game we gave to the world,’ he continued, ‘is no longer played with skill on these islands.’ Apart from Johnny Haynes who had useful games, Jimmy Greaves, who was raw but promising, and Bobby Charlton, who could not excel if played out of position, ‘not one forward justified the great honour paid to him as a representative of his country’.
At the end of the tour FA officials trotted out the usual excuses for the team’s failure, but ignored the most obvious fact: ‘The men at the top chose players who were not the best at England’s disposal. They took poor performers to South America and left good players at home.’ Jack was scathing about having a selection committee to pick the England team, a view soon echoed by other commentators. This lobby of opinion soon led to Walter Winterbottom being placed in sole change of England team affairs. Not before time – Walter had been England’s manager since 1946!