Banksy (7 page)

We set out on the trail of the FA Youth Cup in 1956 as minnows and surprised not only the Chesterfield supporters but also ourselves by reaching the final. Our opponents were the holders–you’ve guessed it–Manchester United, who fielded Wilf McGuinness, Alex Dawson, and a blonde-haired lad on the left wing with a humdinger of a shot, Bobby Charlton. Nobody gave us an earthly. We were up against the cream of young English talent. Nearly all the United side were youth internationals, whereas none of the Chesterfield team had ever watched an international youth game, let alone been selected to play in one.

The final was over two legs, the first at Old Trafford. As our coach drew into the car park I was taken aback by the sheer number of supporters milling about. Chesterfield reserves often drew crowds in excess of over 2,000 for home games against First Division reserve teams and at Anfield or Goodison Park the attendance there might be 14,000 scattered around such large stadiums. Seeing thousands of supporters thronging Old Trafford left me in no doubt that this was to be a big occasion.

Match programmes were always issued for Central League games, though to my knowledge they never carried pen portraits of the players, simply the team line-ups. For this game, however, Manchester United produced a special edition of their matchday programme complete with four- or five-line biographies of each player, which I sat and read in the dressing room. The pen portraits detailed how the United players had been spotted playing either for England Schoolboys, or the North of England Schoolboy Representative XI, or even, in some cases, England Youth. My pen portrait said I had been spotted playing for a works team on Tinsley Rec.

As I ran out of the tunnel with my team mates I was dumbfounded to see around 34,000 people in the ground, all but a
handful United supporters. From the kick-off they got right behind their team. United forced us on the back foot and within minutes I knew how those Texans must have felt at the Alamo. The United pressure was relentless, shot after shot raining in at my goal. I caught them, parried them, tipped them over the bar and blocked them with any part of my body I could. But for all my efforts and those of my team mates, such constant pressure had to pay off for United and just before half time they scored twice.

After the interval United picked up the same script and soon we found ourselves three goals adrift. There was little we could do to stem the pressure. Inside right Harry Peck and centre forward Bob Mellows, whose goals had been so instrumental in our reaching the final, were playing so deep I thought they’d end up with the bends. With twenty minutes to go United took their foot off the gas and I enjoyed a welcome break from Bobby Charlton’s missiles as our forwards went deep into largely uncharted territory. To my delight we managed to pull a goal back and, with five minutes remaining, broke away and nicked a second: 3–2. I couldn’t believe it and I doubt if the United players could either. It had been smash-and-grab stuff but with the second leg at home I left Old Trafford in great spirits, feeling we had gained a moral victory.

A crowd of over 14,000 turned up at Saltergate for the return leg, some 5,000 more than the average attendance for a first team game. The second leg was another humdinger. This time we had more of the play but, in spite of our pressure, couldn’t claw back the deficit. The game ended 1–1, which gave United a fourth successive FA Youth Cup success. We may have lost, but I gained a great deal of satisfaction from our performances as a team, and was happy with my own efforts. We had taken on the best youth side in English football over two games and had only been beaten by the odd goal in seven. I was looking forward to further progress at Chesterfield.

*

The following season my youth team days were largely behind me, and along with team mates Harry Peck, Keith Havenhand and Bob Mellows I was selected for a Northern Intermediate League Representative squad to play the 1955–56 NIL champions Sunderland, at Roker Park. As it turned out, I didn’t play, and the goalkeeper’s jersey went to Alf Ashmore of Sheffield United. However, just being in the squad had been a boost to my confidence. It was the first time I had been selected for a representative team since my days with Sheffield Schoolboys. I felt my performances in goal were not going unnoticed.

It’s interesting now to look at the respective line-ups in the match programme for that representative game. Only two members of the Sunderland team who had won the Northern Intermediate League, Harry Godbold and Clive Bircham went on to play first team football. Both, however, only played a handful of games for Sunderland before moving on, in both cases to Hartlepool. Of the League Representative team, only two went on to carve out meaningful careers in football: left winger Kevin McHale of Huddersfield Town and Bill Houghton of Barnsley. See what I mean about the high fall-out rate of successful youth-team players? The vast majority never fulfil their early promise, whereas there are others who never make it on to the books of clubs as youngsters, but prove to be late developers and enter league football at a relatively older age. The former Manchester skipper Tony Book is a prime example of the late developer. Tony didn’t sign for his first club, Plymouth Argyle, until the age of twenty-five. So if you’re still kicking a ball around, remember, it’s never too late!

In the 1958–59 season my performance in goal for Chesterfield reserves saw me pushing the long-serving Ron Powell for a place in the first team. Ted Davison had been replaced as manager by Duggie Livingstone and it was he who finally gave me my big chance in November 1958. Following Friday training I joined the rest of the players gathered around the noticeboard on which were pinned the four teams for Saturday. When I looked at the
reserve team my name wasn’t included and my first reaction was to check the A team. It still didn’t click with me until the regular first team centre half, Dave Blakey, appeared at my side and said, ‘Good luck, son.’

I scrutinized the first team line up and nearly choked. Banks was in goal for the Third Division home game against Colchester United!

I thought Duggie Livingstone would take me to one side the following day and tell me what was expected of me, but I should have known better. As with most managers of that era, man-management and tactical analysis were not high on his list of priorities.

The night before my league debut I went to bed early, but couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing and I played the forthcoming game over and over in my mind. On the first occasion we won 1–0 and I saved a penalty. Then we won 3–0. At one point I looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was four o’clock. I was angry with myself, certain that by the morning I’d be in no fit state to get out of bed never mind play football. When I arrived at Saltergate the next day the first person to speak to me was our left back, Gerry Sears. ‘Big day for you,’ said Gerry. ‘How’d you sleep last night?’

‘Like a log,’ I lied.

When a player enters a dressing room before a game, he finds his shirt hanging from a peg with the rest of his strip neatly folded on the bench below. In the fifties, as is often the case today, there would also be a large enamel teapot of steaming tea, next to which would be a dozen or so complimentary matchday programmes.

Like most players I know, I wasn’t a great collector of matchday programmes. I have a few, among which are those from my debuts for Chesterfield, Leicester City and England. I wish I’d kept more because with the passing of time, these programmes are a far more revealing read than they were on the day of issue. Today’s programmes resemble glossy magazines and many cost what a Chesterfield supporter of the late fifties would have paid
for a season ticket. Contemporary programmes carry any amount of photographs and a wealth of statistical information. They are too big to slip into your coat pocket so you have to sit holding them for the whole game.

The typical Chesterfield programme of the fifties was three sheets of A4 matt paper folded to make twelve pages. There was little information other than club news – or ‘Saltergate Chatter’ – the team line-ups, pen pictures of the visiting team, the league tables and results of the first team and reserves and a key to the board which displayed the half-time scores from other grounds. The rest of the space was taken up by display advertisements. Yet in those days before local radio, Ceefax, and saturation TV coverage of the game, these flimsy programmes were the main source of match information for supporters. The national papers contained little other than the results and goalscorers. Even the local paper, the
Sheffield Star
, never carried more than a few paragraphs of pre-match information.

Barring injury or a late change of plan on the part of the manager, the eleven you saw in the programme was taken to be the team to be fielded that afternoon. (Today’s matchday magazines list squads, which might be anything up to thirty-five players.) What’s more, a supporter always knew where to find the team line-ups within these programmes: in the centre pages or, failing that, on the inside front cover.

The programme from my debut game against Colchester made much of the fact goalkeeper Ron Powell was set to make his three hundredth consecutive appearance for the club. My selection, of course, denied him that milestone. Although Ron himself was fine about it, I did wonder what sort of reaction I would receive from the Chesterfield faithful when they saw me run out in the goalkeeper’s jersey. The very fact that he had been dropped on the eve of his record-breaking game taught me a lesson about football: there is no room for sentiment in the game.

I had been wondering whether my appearance would be a total surprise to supporters, or whether word would have got
round the terraces that I was set to make my debut. Near the back of the programme, however, I noticed a small paragraph headed ‘Special Note’. It read, ‘The opening paragraphs of Saltergate Chatter were printed before team selection. We now welcome and congratulate Gordon Banks as goalkeeper for today’s match. Ron Powell will receive congratulations on his 300th appearance soon, on the appropriate occasion.’ I took that to mean that they weren’t expecting my elevation to the first team to be a lengthy one!

As I look through that programme now, I’m reminded how different football was in 1958. And it’s a snapshot of a society that has changed almost beyond recognition. Nowhere is this more evident than in the adverts. There is one for the National Coal Board encouraging people to ‘Work in modern mining because it pays’, with ‘many jobs available in mining, mechanical and electrical for men and boys’. Meanwhile, ‘Joyce Mullis ALCM, AIMD (Hons), the gold medallist soprano’, offers teaching in singing and piano, obviously appealing to parents whose idea of providing their offspring with opportunities they never had was to hear them play ‘The Blackbird Gavotte’ on the family heirloom they themselves had never learned to play. Then there is the Dickensian Nathaniel Atrill, ‘For all your coal, coke and anthracite needs’, and T. P. Wood and Co., with the message, ‘Don’t get a reputation for always being seen in pubs, order your home supplies of bottled beers from us’ – the consumption of beer at home then was ambiguously referred to as ‘lace curtain drinking’.

These adverts mirrored football at that time. They were parochial and parsimonious, the organs of small High Street businesses that provided the town with not only commerce but its social glue and identity. Much the same as the football club. The big multinational companies had yet to realize football was a major cultural force and how they could benefit from an association with the game. When they eventually did, in the late seventies, and when television’s insatiable appetite for the game
further fuelled their interest, it signalled the end of small local businesses associating themselves with their local football club, just as the growth of supermarkets, franchises and chain stores in our High Streets ushered in the demise of many of these mainstays of the local economy.

The decline of not only small businesses but traditional industries gave rise to a shifting population. Now you find Chesterfield supporters in London, Bedford, Truro and Bristol. When I played for the club, the remotest fan I heard of lived in Staveley, some twelve miles away. Clubs received a little money from the eight Football Pools companies, namely Littlewoods, Vernons, Shermans, Zetters, Copes, Empire, Soccer and Trent, while programme and pitch-side advertising amounted to little more than pin money. Therefore match receipts were still the main source of income, but because football was still seen primarily as a cheap form of entertainment for working people, admission prices were low. In 1958 a seat at Chesterfield was as little as 4 shillings (20p), whereas to stand on the terraces cost 1s. 6d. (7½p) – far cheaper in relative terms than the price of admission to a Nationwide League game today. Consequently, like a lot of clubs in the divided Third Division, Chesterfield struggled to make ends meet.

Many football club directors ran local businesses themselves and had neither the wherewithal nor the desire to pump money into the local football club. Many viewed it as a ‘private’ club at which to enjoy some social recreation on a Saturday afternoon. It would be twenty years or more before football clubs fully realized their commercial potential. In the fifties there were no commercial departments to exploit the club’s traditional and corporate identity, basically because no one knew their football club had one.

Next to gate receipts the main source of income for a club came from funds raised by its supporters’ club. We were fortunate to have not only the official supporters’ club but an organization called the Chesterfield and District Sportsman’s Association. Both
these bodies regularly contributed substantial sums for the day-today running of the club and, on occasions, the acquisition of new players – probably far more than the board of directors ever did, yet without any say in club policy or the running of the club itself.

Also making his debut that day was inside right Arthur Bottom, bought from Newcastle United with money donated by the two supporters’ organizations through a series of whist drives, bingo sessions and pie and pea supper nights at which I and other players were invariably in attendance. The demands we make on today’s footballers are different. In this era of scientifically planned diet and fitness regimes, we do not expect them to be seen quaffing a few beers, eating steak dinners and socializing until midnight. When I was a player at Chesterfield, it was part and parcel of the job to get out and meet the supporters at their fund-raising nights. It never occurred to you that the end product of such events might be money that the club might use to buy a player to replace you in the team.