Gordon Banks was always a man of quite sublime symmetry and things were no different on the day they laid him to rest.
It was the 47th anniversary of the Wembley final in which his command role helped Stoke City lift the League Cup — still their only silverware.
His death has taken away the crusading zeal of Banks’s work to fight Alzheimer’s, which has afflicted so many of his brothers of ’66 as well as his mother.
Goalkeepers including Kasper Schmeichel and Joe Hart carried the coffin of Gordon Banks
Stoke City keeper Jack Butland, who was close to Banks, also assisted as a pallbearer
No longer will he be in the number of former Stoke players who meet each Tuesday to walk around the city’s Trentham Lake. They will go on without him in what they have decided will become their ‘Gordon Banks walk’.
But the day of remembrance was filled with laughter and memory, more than grief. Sir Geoff Hurst remembered the night, away with England, when a piano player at their restaurant played so loudly, with microphone turned up, that the players could not hear themselves speak.
‘Do you do tunes?’ Banks approached him to ask.
‘What would you like?’ replied the pianist.
‘Can you play far away?’ Banks replied.
(Left to right) Butland, Joe Anyon, Schmeichel, and Hart paid their respects to the late icon
Banks passed away in February at the age of 81, following a long battle with illness
Banks was a better exponent of deadpan humour than was generally appreciated, Hurst reflected. One of his lines in a dinner event they’d done together had always stayed with him.
‘I’ve broken most bones in my fingers, thumbs, wrists,’ Banks had said. ‘My knuckle disappeared in 1968, I’ve had a hip replacement and I’m blind in one eye. Yet I still get some idiot come up to me and say: Do I still play?’
Hurst’s memories and his precise articulation of them are precious because the boys of ’66 are old men now, many of them struggling. Just four — Jack and Sir Bobby Charlton, Roger Hunt and Hurst — were well enough to be in Stoke Minster to bid their old friend a last farewell. Jack Charlton does not look in the best of health.
In many ways, Banks has been a low-key member of that legendary number, while others took greater acclaim. It is the same at Stoke’s ground, where the vast Sir Stanley Matthews banqueting suite is adorned with six cabinet displays to the club’s most beloved son.
The Gordon Banks Suite is far smaller, with wall space for half a dozen images, including two of the man in question out on the club’s old Victoria Ground mud, with no goalkeeping gloves for protection.
There never was a knighthood for Banks, of course, although scores of the messages inked on to flags and shirts at the overflowing memorial to him at the bet365 Stadium expressed thanks to ‘Sir Gordon’. He was ‘the People’s Knight’, someone said.
