The wonderful words of advice from Gordon Banks gave to a young goalkeeper

Gordon Banks may be regarded as one of the finest goalkeepers in the history of football but following news of his death, the 1966 World Cup winner has also been remembered for being a “lovely, decent man”.

Lee Marlow, a former journalist at the Leicester Mercury, the newspaper in the city where Banks spent the majority of his career, interviewed the great man a few years ago and asked him if there was any advice he could pass on to is son, Lucas, who was a budding young goalkeeper.

He wasn’t expecting the wonderful response he would get:

I interviewed Gordon Banks when I was at the Mercury.
I told him my lad played in goal.
I didn’t put his response in the story but it was so lovely I transcribed it and gave it to my son.
It’s still on his bedroom wall today.
God bless you, Gordon Banks x pic.twitter.com/ItGZmqQwTQ

— Lee Marlow (@LM_Marlow) February 12, 2019

Goalkeeping advice from Gordon Banks to Lucas Marlow:

“Hello Lucas, your dad told me that you want to be a goalkeeper? Good lad. We always need good goalkeepers.

“Here’s some advice from me…

“First of all, you have to work hard. Being a goalkeeper is not easy.

“But the more you play, your eyes will get better at spotting the angles. You will begin to know where the ball will go. This is called anticipation – great goalies have good anticipation.

“The eyes pick up the direction of the ball, how it floats through the air, and send messages to your brain and then to your hands. Keep practicing – and you’ll get better and better at this.

“Always know where you are in the goal, narrow the angles down, make it as hard as possible for the striker to score.

“Play with a smaller ball. Playing with a bigger one will seem much easier if you’ve been used to playing with a smaller one.

“Play games like table tennis – that will help to sharpen up your reflexes and your hand-eye co-ordination. Throw a tennis ball against the wall and catch it.

“And be brave – you have to be brave to come out for crosses, or dive at the feet of a centre forward trying to score past you.

“And be brave, too, if you lose or make a mistake. We all make them – I made some mistakes – but I never let anyone see that I was upset.

“Good luck Lucas.”

‘He was a lovely, decent man’

“I interviewed lots of famous people when I was at the Mercury but I felt properly nervous about interviewing Gordon Banks because of the stature of the man,” Marlow tells i. “He was a World Cup winner but he was also just really down-to-earth, a lovely, decent man.

“Towards the end of the interview, I said ‘my son plays in goal’ and on the back of that he just gave me this really lovely advice.

“I think [Lucas] was only seven or eight at the time and he would let one goal in, or two goals in, and his head would drop.

“I told [Banks] that and he said, ‘look, give him this advice.’ It was such lovely, heartfelt advice and so I transcribed it and gave it to my son. He’s still got it on his bedroom wall to this day.”