Authors: Gordon Banks
It must be said that not one member of the team had anything against Hugh McIlmoyle. Hugh was popular among the Leicester players and, even at twenty-one, no mean player. But Hugh had just seven league matches under his belt. It appeared sheer folly on the part of Matt Gillies to pitch the relatively inexperienced Hugh McIlmoyle into the FA Cup final. The players had no say in the matter. Matt Gillies’ word was law. We just hoped Hugh would acquit himself well on the day and that we would not miss Ken Leek’s experience and guile as a centre forward too much.
In punishing Ken, Matt was in many ways punishing the team. Standing on a matter of principle is all well and good, but I believe it was a case of Matt Gillies cutting off his nose to spite his face. It wasn’t as if Ken Leek had been involved in some Bacchanalian revel until the early hours of the morning. He’d had a couple of pints and, according to Ken, was at home and in bed by eleven – hardly the sort of night out that would impair his performance in the final. Matt Gillies should have given Ken a good ticking off, reminded him of his responsibilities and perhaps, after the final, imposed a fine. That would have been punishment enough and Matt would not have compromised his position and authority as manager. In dropping Ken from the team, Matt Gillies, to my mind, did a lot of harm to our chances of lifting the cup.
Not all players are consummate athletes, one or two have habits out of keeping with our profession, such as drinking and smoking. But if those habits do not impair personal performance or harm the team in any way, as long as they are indulged in
moderation, many managers turn a blind eye to them. John Robertson, a key member of Nottingham Forest’s League Championship side of 1978 and their European Cup-winning teams of 1979 and 1980, had personal habits not wholly approved of by Forest manager Brian Clough: a very casual dress sense, for instance, and his liking for fags. But Cloughie turned a blind eye to both because neither affected Robertson’s performances and contribution to the Forest team. As Cloughie said, ‘He thinks I don’t know he has a crafty fag when we break off from training. He turns up at the ground in loafers, unshaven and looking like a tramp, but he’s the best bloody crosser of a ball in Europe. When John sets off down the left wing, I know he’s going to beat his man then float that ball to the far post and on to the head of Trevor Francis or Gary Birtles. That’s why I say nowt!’
Don Mackay, manager of Blackburn Rovers between 1987 and 1991, took Rovers to three First Division play-offs in the days before the club benefited from the munificence of Jack Walker. Blackburn’s centre forward at that time was Simon Garner, a player not only given to smoking but one who also liked a beer. It was rumoured that, even at home, Garner would drink at least three or four cans of beer a night. Don Mackay, being the good manager he is, was well aware of Garner’s liking of cigarettes and beer but let it ride. When asked by a club official why he never brought Garner to task about his smoking and drinking habits, Don said, ‘Because he’s a twenty-plus goals a season player. Have you any idea how hard it is to find that sort of player these days?’
Brian Clough and Don Mackay were right to adopt a laissez-faire attitude to their players. John Robertson was one of the best, if not the best, wide player in Europe at the time. He created countless goals for Forest. Who can forget the cross he made for Trevor Francis against Malmo in 1979 that won the European Cup for Forest? As for Simon Garner, his 168 goals for Blackburn Rovers remains a club record.
Beer and certainly cigarettes don’t help a player where athleticism
is concerned, but in certain cases, such as that of Robertson and Garner, they certainly didn’t seem to do any harm. Some players never touch alcohol or cigarettes at all and in their preparation for a game like to be tucked up in bed by 9 p.m. However, there are some individuals whose idea of pre-match preparation is a couple of tins of beer in the privacy of their own home. Brian Clough and Don Mackay obviously understood this. For either manager to have laid down the law in an attempt to restrict Robertson or Garner from pursuing their normal lifestyle would in all probability have caused disciplinary problems, which so often lead in turn to a player underperforming on the pitch.
Every player is different. The majority of players find it benefits them to observe a very careful and specific diet and to get to bed early. But there are exceptions. So long as having a beer, a cigarette or a takeaway is done in moderation and such indulgence never impairs personal performance, or gives a poor example to younger, impressionable players, most managers will tolerate it. Players with ‘unhealthy’ personal habits are not the norm in football. They weren’t in the late seventies and eighties and they are even rarer in the football of today. But such personal idiosyncrasies of lifestyle must be weighed against what a player contributes to the team on the pitch. Without doubt the contributions of Robertson and Garner to their respective teams were huge. So too was Ken Leek’s to Leicester City. So why Matt Gillies reacted in such a heavy-handed way to a couple of beers, and left Ken out of our Cup final team, I still find baffling. Still, we couldn’t change things now. At last we had to turn our eyes to the famous Twin Towers and go and win the Cup for Leicester.
To play in an FA Cup Final is the pinnacle of a player’s career. It was certainly my greatest moment at that time. I was twenty-three, had been at Leicester for only two seasons and couldn’t believe the good fortune that had befallen me. From Chesterfield reserves to the final of the oldest cup competition in the world in three years.
For such an important game, everything is planned to the last detail. Before setting off for Wembley each player received a meticulous itinerary from club secretary Charles Maley detailing to the minute what time the players had to meet at Filbert Street, the time the coach left the ground for Leicester station and its arrival there. It even stated what time we would be served sandwiches on the train and what the sandwich fillings would be! Everything was planned to a rigorous timetable right up until our arrival on Saturday at Wembley.
Maley’s plans took us up until 1 p.m. when the Football Association’s player’s itinerary known as the ‘Programme of Arrangements’ took over. This very grand-looking little booklet bears the FA’s three lions crest and proudly proclaims that the final will take place in the presence of the Patron of the Football Association, Her Majesty the Queen. Inside everything is clearly set out for players and match officials: which team had which dressing room (Spurs had the North, Leicester the South); how and when we had to leave the dressing room; what we had to do once out on the pitch; what to say and what not to say if addressed by a royal personage. It was all in there. Even the protocol for ascending to the royal box for the presentations is described, with this surreal advice: ‘Players and Officials going to the Royal Box are warned to be careful. Do not under any circumstances step
back and over-balance on the balcony.’ So everything, even not falling off the balcony, is planned to the last detail. (I doubt whether, on the day, we players gave the ‘Programme of Arrangements’ and the contents therein more than a cursory glance, relying instead on the punctilious Mr Maley to keep us right.) It’s a pity that the game itself couldn’t have been organized as rigorously, for it took only fifteen minutes for our schemes to go awry.
For people of a certain age, the Spurs team of that day runs off the tongue like a litany: Brown; Baker, Henry; Blanch-flower, Norman, Mackay; Jones, White, Smith, Allen, Dyson. We lined up alongside them in readiness to be presented to the Duke of Edinburgh: Gordon Banks; Len Chalmers, Richie Norman; Frank McLintock, Ian King, Colin Appleton; Howard Riley, Jimmy Walsh, Hugh McIlmoyle, Ken Keyworth, Albert Cheesebrough.
Both teams caused a minor sensation by breaking with tradition in wearing tracksuits when taking to the pitch. Ours were pale blue with the club crest, a fox’s head, stitched on to the left breast; Tottenham’s were white zip-front tracksuit tops, with emblazoned on the back the single word, ‘Spurs’.
I remember glancing around the stadium and being impressed by the sheer number of Leicester City fans present, especially in view of the fact that while our average home attendance was over 30,000, Spurs regularly drew crowds in excess of 50,000 to White Hart Lane. Two and a half million people had watched Tottenham home and away in their league and cup games, to this day the greatest number of spectators to watch a team in a single season in the history of British football. Yet each club received a ticket allocation of just 18,000, out of a total of 100,000. It was to the City supporters’ credit then that thousands more had managed to track down tickets from whatever source – probably, in the main, from spivs (the term we used for ticket touts in those days) at vastly inflated prices. Each player had received twelve complimentary tickets for family and friends, of whom a Cup finalist suddenly has more than he ever realized!
The Cup final had been given an extra edge by the fact that Spurs were chasing what the newspapers had dubbed ‘the impossible double’. No team had won both the League Championship and the FA Cup in the same season throughout the century. Newcastle United in 1905, Sunderland in 1913 and Manchester United in 1957 had each won the League Championship but lost in the FA Cup final. Most people believed the heavy fixture programme and the intense competitiveness of the modern game were such that no team could win both in the same season. I just hoped they would be proved right.
If Spurs felt the pressure placed on them by the press, it certainly didn’t show. They were very laid back, taking a trip to the cinema to see
The Guns of Navarone
at the Odeon, Leicester Square, after which they all stayed up till after midnight with a couple of beers back at their hotel. We had all been in bed by ten thirty. When a reporter from the London
Evening News
queried the wisdom of this, it was Danny Blanchflower again who came up with the quotable quote: ‘I can only tell you the story of the golfer, Walter Hagen. Hagen was up late before a crucial play-off match, and a reporter told him, “I suppose you know your opponent has been long in his bed?” “Sure,” said Hagen, “but do you honestly think he’s getting any sleep?”’
Spurs were confident but so too were we. In his pre-match team talk Matt Gillies reminded us of how we had beaten Spurs at White Hart Lane. Our game plan, such as it was, again relied on Jimmy Walsh and Ken Keyworth closing down Danny Blanchflower and Dave Mackay, while Hugh McIlmoyle was to play as a deep-lying centre forward in the hope of dragging the Spurs centre half Maurice Norman out of position and creating space for Jimmy and Ken to exploit.
And that’s just how it worked out, for those first fifteen minutes. We set about Spurs with some verve but, after a quarter of an hour, disaster struck. Our right back, Len Chalmers, sustained an injury to his knee ligaments. It wasn’t the result of a bad tackle, just bad luck. The damage was so bad that he should
have left the field immediately, but there were no substitutes in those days, and he carried on gamely.
I wonder how many players, prior to the introduction of substitutes to English football in 1967, did permanent damage to their bodies through continuing in a game with a bad injury? There are no statistics, but I should imagine it was quite a few. The absence of substitutes apart, the knowledge trainers had of injuries and their effects, was nowhere near as comprehensive then as it is today. When a player was injured he was expected to carry on playing as best he could, no matter how debilitating the injury. Wilf McGuinness, the former Manchester United and England wing half, sustained a bad injury during a United reserve game at Stoke City in 1959–60. The advice from the United bench to Wilf was to ‘run it off’, which was the advice most benches gave to players who had sustained any type of muscular injury. Wilf bravely carried on but it’s hard to run off a stress fracture, which is what he had. Wilf eventually had to have a bone graft, the bone failed to knit and he suffered numerous complications. He did make a return to the United reserve team, for one season, but irreparable damage had been done and Wilf had to retire from playing in his early twenties.
The injury to Len Chalmers was nowhere near as serious, but nonetheless debilitating. He couldn’t run, so Matt switched him to the wing, with Howard Riley dropping back. Such was Len’s courage that he battled on, wincing every time he limped towards the ball. Len made a positive contribution of a sort, in that a Spurs player still had to mark him in case the ball was played into his feet. But we were effectively playing with ten men.
So many players had sustained serious injuries in cup finals at Wembley in the fifties that the press came up with the line that there was a ‘Wembley Hoodoo’. Of course that was nonsense, but players getting seriously injured in Wembley showpiece occasions were becoming an almost annual event.
In 1952 Arsenal were reduced to ten men against Newcastle
United when their full back Wally Barnes badly injured knee ligaments in making a tackle. Typical of Arsenal’s spirit, Barnes returned to the fray not once but twice, but so bad was his injury he eventually succumbed to it after half an hour. In 1953 Bolton’s left half Eric Bell carried on gamely despite a bad injury to his knee and even managed to score. Two years later Manchester City right back Jimmy Meadows tore knee ligaments and was stretchered off after twenty minutes against Newcastle United.
The following year saw perhaps the most frightening injury of all when the Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann, a boyhood hero of mine, broke his neck when making a save at the feet of Birmingham’s Peter Murphy. As I have intimated, the knowledge trainers had of injuries was very sketchy and Bert carried on playing with his neck broken. It was only after Manchester City’s 3–1 success, when Bert complained of severe headaches, that he was taken to a hospital and an X-ray revealed a fracture that could so easily have been fatal.
The ‘Wembley Hoodoo’ was seen to strike again the following year. On the occasion of Aston Villa meeting Manchester United in the final, the United goalkeeper Ray Wood suffered concussion and a broken cheekbone as the result of a robust challenge (deemed to be a foul) by Villa’s Peter McParland. This happened after only six minutes and with Wood off the field, United had to put wing half Jackie Blanchflower, the brother of Danny, in goal. As Jackie was later to say, ‘Playing in goal in a Cup final was the moment I realized adrenalin was brown.’