Authors: Gordon Banks
The game ended in a 2–2 draw. I felt pleased with my first taste of open-age football. I was only fifteen and most of the players were in their middle to late twenties. I must have impressed the Millspaugh manager because after the game he asked if I would like to be their regular goalkeeper. Without hesitation I said yes.
After less than a season with Millspaugh, Rawmarsh Welfare invited me to sign for them. Rawmarsh played in the Yorkshire League which was a much higher grade of football. I made my debut in an away game against Stocksbridge Works. Any thought I may have had of making my name in what was then the highest non-league level of football in the county was quickly dispelled when we lost 12–2. Following a second game, a 3–1 home defeat, the Rawmarsh manager let me down gently, saying, ‘Don’t bother coming again.’
The following Saturday found me back on the touchline watching Millspaugh at the local rec. Once again the trainer approached me.
‘Goalkeeper hasn’t turned up. Fancy a game?’
Oddly enough, I did.
I had given up coal-bagging and started as an apprentice bricklayer with a local building firm. Much of my time as a rookie was spent hod-carrying for the experienced brickies, which was even
harder graft than the coal-bagging. A lot of Sheffield’s housing had been destroyed by Hitler’s bombs and in the early fifties a massive rebuilding and slum-clearance programme had begun across the city. A lot of the old Victorian terraced houses were little more than slums and many of those that had survived Hitler’s bombs, didn’t survive the Government’s initiative to provide better housing for the nation. Sheffield in the mid-fifties was like one massive building site. There was a shortage of skilled brickies; they were on piece work to keep them to the formidable work-rates required. The more bricks he laid, the more the brickie took home in his pay packet. As a young hod-carrier I had to load the V-shaped hod, lump that on my shoulder and scale two or three sets of ladders up the scaffolding. It was relentless, sweaty work. Having delivered the bricks, no sooner had I descended the ladders and returned to the brick ‘fort’ to reload, than the brickie would be screaming from up top for more. I was still only fifteen and knew better than to complain. In the run-up to Christmas the brickies, intent on earning more for their families, worked even faster. Health and safety considerations were non-existent. I never wore a hard hat on site. One day a falling brick gave me a mighty whack on the side of my head. I stopped midway down the ladder, blood streaming from a gashed temple. The brickie was very sympathetic. ‘Get an effing move on!’ he shouted. ‘What an effing scene ower nowt. Yon brick was only on yer head for a second!’
They were hard men and hard task masters, those brickies, but they had hearts of gold. Come pay day, many was the time the brickie would slip me a few extra bob out of his own pay packet, as a tip for having serviced him so well and helping him make his piece-work bonus.
Like coal-bagging before it, hod-carrying made my upper body strong and muscular, while constantly running up and down ladders strengthened my legs. I may only have been in my mid-teens, but I was no scrawny, gangly youth.
*
I didn’t recognize the man in the overcoat watching Millspaugh from the touchline. After the game he introduced himself as a scout from Chesterfield. He thought I might have some potential as a goalkeeper, and said he would like to give me a try-out in the Chesterfield youth team. There were six games left of the season and if I did well enough in those games, I might be offered terms.
Before that day, the thought of making my living as a professional footballer could not have been further from my mind. But now, this could be my chance.
Chesterfield were in the Third Division North, since at the time the two lower divisions of the Football League were regionalized. This system had been in operation since 1921, when the Football League was expanded to accommodate the growing number of full-time professional clubs. Because the country’s infrastructure in the twenties was a network of largely minor roads, travel was both time-consuming and difficult. The Football League, in expanding its remit, decided to form two regionalized Third Divisions with a view to keeping travel time and costs to a minimum. By and large this system worked well, though there were certain clubs, Chesterfield being one, whose geographical position meant they were ‘borderline’ and often the system did them no favours. It was a long and expensive trip for Chesterfield to Gateshead, Workington or Carlisle; whereas Walsall, Coventry and Northampton, although much nearer, operated in the Third Division South. Likewise, those three clubs had to travel to Plymouth, Torquay, Exeter and Gillingham in the extreme south-west and south-east corners of England.
Chesterfield were considered a small club, but even so enjoyed an average attendance of around 9,000, twice that of today. While they played in the northern section of the then regionalized Third Division, the reserves played in the Central League and the youth team in the Northern Intermediate League. Both these competitions were very strong and invariably, Chesterfield found themselves scrubbing about near the foot of both. The Central League was the premier reserve league for the top teams in the north of England. In this era before substitutes, clubs such as Manchester United, Liverpool, Everton, Blackpool and Newcastle fielded very strong teams week in week out; if a player had
not made the first XI at his club, he played in the Central League side. So it was not uncommon to line up against players with a great deal of First Division and even international experience.
In truth, Chesterfield should never have been members of the Central League, the standard of play being way beyond many of the club’s second-string players. Chesterfield were the perennial whipping boys, they usually finished bottom of the table and their continued membership of this league was puzzling, especially as the reserve teams of much bigger clubs such as Sunderland and Middlesbrough were forever having their applications to join this league turned down. However, I soon realized why the reserve team were immune from relegation to a lower standard of football: one of the Chesterfield directors was a key member of the Central League Management Committee! Similarly, the Chesterfield youth team played in the highly competitive Northern Intermediate League, alongside the under-nineteen teams from Newcastle United, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, both Sheffield clubs, Leeds and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
My sights were set no higher than a place in the Chesterfield youth team when I first arrived at Saltergate one rainswept evening at the end of March 1953. I’d been told to report to the ground at 6.30 p.m. for training, and found myself getting changed alongside around eighteen young amateurs and part-time professionals.
Chesterfield were one of the few clubs to possess a gymnasium but any thoughts I may have had of working out on wall bars and practising my goalkeeping technique by diving around on crash mats, quickly evaporated.
The ‘gym’ turned out to be a small cellar-like space underneath the sloping grandstand, no more than twenty-five feet by twelve. Its ceiling was a network of steel girders supporting the grandstand seating above. From one girder hung a plank of wood on a rope. This was for sit-ups. There were two old household mats on which players did press-ups, a short bench and a set of weights. A medicine ball was suspended from a girder above another
sloping plank of wood, the purpose of which was never clear to me in all the time I was there. Finally, there was a boxer’s punchball, suspended from another girder. It wasn’t what Arsenal were used to, but with eighteen players working away in such a confined place, that little gym was a sweatbox. After an hour in there, you would definitely shed a few ounces whether you were working out or just watching.
Pummelling the punchball seemed at first to be an odd sort of football training. However, the trainer set me to work on it and in time I had not only strengthened my wrists, hands and arm muscles, but also improved mysense of timing and co-ordination. In later life, when jumping up above a knot of players to punch a ball clear, I rarely missed, and got good distance. I am sure those early workouts in the Chesterfield gym were the reason.
As I had been promised, I was picked to play in all six Northern Intermediate games left in the season. I must have done something right because I was asked to report back for pre-season training in July 1953. When I did, the manager Ted Davison offered me a contract as a part-time professional player. I was to train at the club on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and play for whichever team I was selected for on the Saturday, for which I would be paid £3 a week. On signing the contract I was ecstatic. I may only have been a part-time player for a Third Division North club, but I couldn’t have been happier if I’d been offered full terms with Manchester United. I had been signed by a Football League club and saw this as a first step to a career in football. The day I signed for Chesterfield was the day I allowed myself to dream.
I was so enthusiastic that the thrice-weekly travelling to Chesterfield never bothered me. After a hard day on the building site I would rush home, eat a sandwich, collect my training kit and be out of the door in fifteen minutes flat. I had to be quick because the journey to Saltergate involved a bus from my home in Catcliffe into Sheffield city centre, another bus to Chesterfield, then either catch yet another bus or embark on a brisk walk to
the ground. Today many youngsters won’t turn up for training or a game at a club unless they are given a lift. The thought of making their own way to training or a match on public transport appears anathema to them. Not to me. As I sat on the bus to Chesterfield, I felt full of anticipation about this new love of my life.
My performances for the Chesterfield youth team earned me a promotion to the A team, then the reserves. I’d allowed myself to dream but the reality of the Central League woke me up with a jolt. Chesterfield Reserves, a team of hopeful young semi-professionals and amateurs, bolstered by two or three fulltime professionals who had not been chosen for the first team, were meat and drink to just about every team we came up against. More often than not, Chesterfield Reserves conceded over a hundred goals a season. In 1954–55, for example, we finished bottom with just three wins to our name. I conceded 122 goals in 42 games, an average of three per game; we lost quite often by four or five clear goals, sometimes more. Without putting too fine a point on it, I was a very busy goalkeeper. However, I’d like to think that, for all we conceded one hundred plus goals a season, my efforts prevented it from being even more.
In spite of the constant hammering, my enthusiasm never wavered. I loved playing in goal, especially in the Central League where just about every week I’d come face to face with a hero of mine. Against Leeds United I faced the great John Charles who was having a run out with the reserves on his way back from injury. Known as the Gentle Giant, John was blessed with a magnificent physique and was equally at home at centre half or centre forward. In the air he was peerless and his distribution excellent, his vision enabling him to see openings invisible to others. He had a shot like an Exocet and could shoot from any angle, even when off balance. Above all, he was a great sportsman.
Knowing I was a young lad with only a handful of reserve team games to my name, the awesome figure of John Charles came up to me as the teams took the field.
‘Now, don’t you worry, son,’ he said. ‘You do your best out here today. I won’t hurt you and I won’t go up with you for a ball with my arms flailing. Enjoy yourself and do your best for your club. No one’s going to clatter you this afternoon.’
We lost that game 5–0 and I think I’m right in saying John Charles scored three. He was true to his word, however, and never gave me any rough treatment. As a 16-year-old I would have been a pushover for him, but he played it fair and he played it straight. That was Big John, a player whose tremendous sense of sportsmanship was in keeping with his great talent for the game.
On another occasion, following a seven-goal defeat at Wolves, I was soaking my aches and bruises in the Molineux plunge bath when one of the Chesterfield directors emerged through the pall of steam alongside a Wolves official who, to my surprise, wanted a word with me.
‘I just had to come and offer my congratulations,’ said the Wolves man. ‘You let in seven today, but if it weren’t for you, it could have been ten. Well done, lad! That was as good a performance in goal as I’ve seen in many a year. Take heart from that.’
I did.
It was quite common in those days for a top player from a First Division club to see out his career in the lower divisions. Nowadays, even journeymen Premiership players earn so much during their time in the game that few wish to run the gauntlet of sledgehammer tackles from robust young players out to make a name for themselves in the Third Division or non-league. Many of today’s Premiership players, even those who have never been awarded star status, use the money they have earned from the game to start businesses, or simply invest it in financial plans and live for the rest of their days off the proceeds. Some may supplement that income with a little media or promotional work.
In the fifties, due to the maximum wage, even well-established
players in the First Division did not have that opportunity to earn much from the game, certainly nowhere near the amount of money needed to keep them and their families for the rest of their days. For the vast majority, football was all they knew and when released by a top club, a good number simply dropped down a standard or two in order to carry on earning a living.
Even when players reached their late thirties, such was their desire to carry on earning something from their skills, many were content to play even in the reserves for a Second or Third Division team – a situation you never come across nowadays. There is no room for seasoned professionals in reserve football. Apart from the occasional appearance of a first-team player in need of match practice following injury, the reserve teams of today are the preserve of emerging talent. In these days of rotational squads and multiple substitutes, many seasoned professionals, amazingly, seem happier to sit on the bench, or even in the stand, than play a lower level of football. A footballer’s career is relatively short. When your playing days are over, do you want to look back on all that time spent sitting on the bench, or in the stand? You can sit and spectate when you’re ninety years old, but you can’t stay at the top much past thirty-five. I came across countless seasoned pros who had played top-flight football during my time in the Chesterfield reserves. We even had one or two of our own – most notably, Eddie Shimwell.