Brilliant Gordon Banks was England’s saving grace

There was a story Gordon Banks loved to tell, always with a smile, about that save from Pelé in 1970, a split-second moment of magic that threatened to eclipse his achievement as England’s goalkeeping hero when Alf Ramsey’s men won England’s only World Cup, four years earlier.

Banks’ infamous save, defying the laws of physics, gravity, and logic to fling himself from one side of the goal to the other in order to tip the great Brazilian’s header over the bar, has long become the stuff of legend.