Authors: Gordon Banks
That’s how it was back then. There was no squad rotation system, no horses for courses where a player might be picked because his style was considered suited to a specific game plan, or thought to be problematic to a particular team or opponent. The manager picked his best eleven for the first team. His second best eleven for the reserves and so on. It was black and white and
rarely did anyone question the manager’s decision. Players had no say in matters.
If the club decided to sell a player, he had to uproot and move home and family to wherever he’d been sold. If a club didn’t want the services of a player any more, he was never told in person. He simply received the dreaded ‘Not retained’ letter at the end of the season – the signal for him to pack his bags and leave. Even if we’d had a voice in matters, no one would have listened. Players were seen by the clubs as commodities, to be hired and fired, bought or sold. There were no agents or personal advisers to look after our interests, no heart-to-heart chats with the manager and certainly no mollycoddling.
As I scanned the team sheets my spirits soared. I was in the reserve team. This was a tremendous boost to my confidence. Having arrived at the club with high hopes I’d been brought back down to earth when I realized I was sixth-choice goalkeeper. Now, after only six weeks and four friendly matches, I was number two. Dave MacLaren had been chosen to keep goal for the first team at West Ham United. The reserves were at home to Southend United. Hardly a classic game in the making, but one I was looking forward to greatly. In the previous season Leicester reserves had been champions of the Football Combination. To make it into that side at the first time of asking was a great boost to my spirits and made me feel I was making headway. However, even I was to be taken aback by how quickly my progress was to gather momentum.
I kept a clean sheet on my debut, a goalless draw against Southend, and also in my second game, a 4–0 victory at West Ham United – my first ever game in London. There followed a 5–2 win against Bristol City and a 0–2 home defeat to Chelsea reserves. Although we lost against Chelsea I came off the pitch feeling I’d had my best game to date. I wasn’t the only person to think that.
The Leicester first team were due to play Blackpool at Filbert Street the following Wednesday. The team for that game was
pinned up after Tuesday morning training. I was still in the changing room drinking tea and chatting with some of the lads when one of my team mates from the reserves, Richie Norman, sauntered in.
‘Seen the team, Gordon?’ Richie asked. I told him I hadn’t. ‘Dave MacLaren’s injured. You should go see who Mr Gillies has picked in goal.’
As I walked to the noticeboard I crossly assumed that the experienced Johnny Anderson had been chosen to play. On seeing the team sheet, however, my irritation was immediately replaced by joy. There was my name, in goal against Blackpool the following day. I suddenly felt the whack of Richie Norman’s hand on my shoulder.
‘Well done, Gordon,’ he said, ‘well deserved.’
A crowd of 28,089 witnessed my Leicester City debut. It bore certain similarities to my first game for Chesterfield in that the manager said little apart from ‘Good luck and do your best’. Matt had obviously waited until the last moment before making a decision about Dave MacLaren’s fitness because it was his name that appeared in the match programme. I wasn’t mentioned at all. Not that it bothered me – I had other things to occupy my mind, not least a very lively Blackpool forward line that contained Jackie Mudie and Bill Perry, both of whom had played in the 1953 ‘Matthews Final’, and rising stars Ray Charnley, Arthur Kaye and Dave Durie.
I was a little disappointed to learn that the great Stanley Matthews wasn’t included in the Blackpool team as I would have loved to have played against the maestro. Stan was forty-four years of age but still eminently capable of playing First Division football. He had, in fact, been a member of the England team only two years previously. But I’d heard that he was at loggerheads with Blackpool boss Ron Suart, who wanted him to play deeper and get more involved in general build-up play rather than simply jink up and down the wing and tease the left back. Football, however, was changing. It was becoming more tactical,
teams were becoming better organized and Stan’s style obviously didn’t suit Suart. Stan was nowhere near as quick as he used to be, but he was still sharp and his talismatic qualities were invaluable to a team. His mere presence in the Blackpool side used to lift the players and would have put up to 7,000 on the gate.
The Leicester crowd gave me their full support that night, as did my new team mates. As a young debutant I couldn’t have asked for more from my defence. Len Chalmers, Joe Baillie, John Newman, Tony Knapp and Colin Appleton encouraged me for the duration of the game, saying ‘well done’ to just about everything I did. Whenever I had the ball in my hands, Len Chalmers and Joe Baillie would run out wide and make themselves available. If I was considering a long kick upfield to our forwards, centre half Tony Knapp told me to take my time. I made a concerted effort to ‘command my domain’, that is, the penalty box, coming off my line quickly to collect crosses and then telling my defence to push up.
Our inside left, Ken Leek, put us in front, but that wily little predator, Jackie Mudie, pulled a goal back for Blackpool. I think it was Blackpool’s Arthur Kaye who played the ball into our penalty box from the right. Mudie latched on to the pass and seeing him free of his marker, I quickly came off my line to close down his vision of goal. Jackie, a shrewd and calculating inside forward, spotted a small gap to my left and simply stroked the ball down that channel and into the corner of the net. There wasn’t much power behind his effort; there didn’t need to be. Mudie knew I wouldn’t reach the ball and went for accuracy rather than venom. The game ended in a 1–1 draw. I was disappointed to concede a goal, but happy that I had managed to get through the game without making a serious error.
I retained my place for the following game, a 2–0 defeat at Newcastle United, but with Dave MacLaren once again fit found myself back in the reserves when Leicester travelled to Blackpool for their return league fixture. My return to the second XI, however, was not to be for long.
While I concentrated my efforts in the Football Combination, the Leicester first team began to leak goals. A 3–3 draw at Blackpool was followed by a 4–3 victory at Birmingham City. Then there came a 1–1 draw with Spurs, a 4–1 defeat at Manchester United and a 3–2 home defeat at the hands of Blackburn Rovers – fourteen goals conceded in five games. Matt Gillies was obviously concerned because for the next game, away at Manchester City, I found myself recalled to the first team. I wish I could say I came back into the team and suddenly Leicester became watertight in defence, but I can’t. We lost 3–2 at Manchester City, drew 2–2 at home to Arsenal, then, suffered the ignominy of a 6–1 defeat at Everton. Six! It was like being back with Chesterfield reserves. I was a very busy goalkeeper in that game and for all I conceded half a dozen, I do remember making some telling saves late in the game from efforts by Everton’s Bobby Collins, Brian Harris and Alex Parker that could have made the margin of defeat even more comprehensive.
Although my presence in the team hadn’t stemmed the tide of goals, I felt that with each game my performance was improving. Following our defeat at Everton I kept my place for the game against Sheffield Wednesday and was to be an ever-present in the team for the remainder of that season. We lost games, of course, but never again were we on the receiving end of a hammering. The emphasis was still very much on attacking football at this time, but in only two games in the new year did we concede more than two goals: a 3–1 defeat against Birmingham City and a 3–3 draw with Everton.
Leicester finished a creditable twelfth in the First Division, not bad considering we had had a poor start with only four victories from our first twenty matches. Our form in the new year gave rise to great optimism and I had taken heart from my own performances. After that disappointing start to our campaign, we only lost six of our remaining twenty-two league games. Since my arrival at the club as sixth-choice goalkeeper it had taken me little over a quarter of a season to establish myself in the first team.
Progress had its price, of course. I was my own sternest critic and I placed great demands upon myself both in physical training and learning goalkeeping technique. I knew I couldn’t hope to progress on talent alone. I wanted to continue improving as a goalkeeper and became single-minded in this aim. After my normal training (which, in fact, was the same training every other player at the club did, irrespective of the position he played) I’d ask a couple of the youth team players to stay behind with me at the training ground to practise shooting at me. I was keen to develop, even evolve, the practical side of goalkeeping. Sometimes I’d ask these young lads to ping shots at my goal from a variety of angles. On one occasion, for an hour or so, all I asked them to do was either chip or lob the ball towards goal. I took up a position half way between the penalty spot and the edge of the penalty area. Constantly running backwards to get to the ball, I worked out the best position I could take up relative to the kicker in order to backpedal and still make the save.
Players in training at both Chesterfield and Leicester tended to work to their strengths rather than their weaknesses. To my mind, this was the wrong way to go about things. I made a concerted effort to work on aspects of my game I felt were weak – taking crosses on my left-hand side, for example. I had one of the young lads drive or float crosses into the penalty area for me to collect while under the challenge of two other players. I wasn’t always able to make the catch, so I had to work on all the different ways of punching the ball clear when under pressure. Through constant practice I built a repertoire of seven punches, each suited to a particular situation.
Throughout my first season with Leicester I was hell-bent on improving as a goalkeeper and learning as much about goalkeeping as time would allow. A lot of players on establishing themselves in a first team, through a combination of their own satisfaction and sense of achievement, don’t work as hard at their own game as they ought to. Many go into a comfort zone, feeling that as a first-team regular they no longer need to work on their
technique. On the contrary, that is when the hard work should begin. No doubt you have seen plenty of gifted players who never go on to fulfil what you believe could be their true potential. They rest on their laurels. They work hard in training, they carry out tactical ploys to the letter, but don’t apply themselves to greater effect in their own technique, skills and role in the team. In short, they don’t push themselves as much as they should. Hence they never fully evolve into players that can contribute that little bit more, or, something special to a team when it is needed. I had no idea how good a goalkeeper I could be, but I was resolved to find out. I worked hard at improving my footwork, my handling, punching, positioning, reflex saves, clearances, both out of my hands and dead ball. I worked at building my stamina and strength, body suppleness and ability to ride a challenge. I studied angles, the flight of the ball and how best to organize my defence in front of me. I worked on taking high balls, low balls, shot-stopping from close range and from every distance and angle. Come the end of the 1959–60 season I knew enough about goalkeeping to realize just how much I still had to learn!
I was ambitious but so too were Leicester City. Unfortunately the club’s finances were rather more down to earth. During the season the club had made unsuccessful offers for John White of Falkirk (who eventually opted for Spurs), Hibernian’s Joe Baker (who was signed by Italian giants Torino) and a centre forward who had been scoring a lot of goals for Second Division Middlesbrough, Brian Clough. In 1961 Clough made the short move to Sunderland, going on to score 251 goals in 274 games before a bad knee injury curtailed his career at the age of twenty-seven. Leicester simply couldn’t compete in the transfer market when the likes of Clough were selling for £45,000, let alone the £73,000 Torino were prepared to pay for Baker. While it showed that Matt Gillies and his new chief scout Bert Johnson were good judges of talent, they could not pay silly prices.
I suppose I was one of Matt’s successful signings that season,
but I wasn’t the only one. In the close season the club had also signed Albert Cheesebrough from Burnley. Albert had gone straight into the first team and only missed one game in 1959–60. The £20,000 fee for Albert, a considerable one for Leicester, proved to be money well spent. He was a fast, skilful, hard-working and versatile forward with a bullet of a shot – but what I remember most about him is his thighs. They were the most enormous thighs of anyone I ever saw, like bags of cement and made even the baggiest shorts appear tight. His bulging calves were no less remarkable, either.
Albert Cheesebrough… how the names of the players have changed in the past forty years! Gordon Banks is a straightforward name that would, I am sure, pass without comment in any generation of football. The name Albert Cheesebrough, however, appears now to be exactly what it is: a name from another era of football. We don’t have players by the name of Albert Cheesebrough, Arthur Bottom or Mortimer Costello in football in the new millennium. Yet such yeomanesque names were far from unique in football at that time. In the short time I had spent with Chesterfield and Leicester I also came across Grenville Hair (Leeds United), Willie Myerscough (Aston Villa) and Geoffrey Sidebottom (Wolves). There was also Stan Ackerley (Manchester United), Redfern Froggatt (Sheffield Wednesday), Basil Acres (Ipswich Town), Ray Bumstead (Bournemouth), Gerry Cakebread (Brentford), Ralph Gubbins (Hull City), Allenby Cornfield (Shrewsbury Town), Harold Threadgold (Southend), Arthur Longbottom (QPR) and Albert Otheringcroft (Gateshead). Football names to be sure, but ones that seem to have leaped straight from the pages of Dickens or Harold Brighouse’s
Hobson’s Choice
.