Sheffield World Cup winner Gordon Banks honoured with place in new biography

Gordon Banks on the pitch with Bobby Moor, Peter Thompson and Martin Peters after the World Cup victory

Banks, born in Abbeydale and brought up in Tinsley, has been included in the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Fellow World Cup hero Bobby Charlton described him as ‘the bedrock of our hopes’ in 1966.

And the Sheffield stopper did not disappoint – only letting in three goals in the whole tournament, two of them in the final.

Torchbearer 089 Vikki Orvice carries the Olympic Flame on the Torch Relay leg between Barnsley and Kexbrough

He is also known worldwide for what is often described as the greatest save ever made, remarkably managing to tip a close-range header by Pelé over the bar at the 1970 World Cup.

Banks was named the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year in 1972 and was FIFA Goalkeeper of the Year six times.

The International Federation of Football History & Statistics named Banks, who died in 2019 aged 81, the second-best goalkeeper of the 20th century, after Russian Lev Yashin.

He is joined in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Sheffield-born Vikki Orvice.

Vikki was a pioneer for women in sports journalism, encountering and overcoming prejudice as the first woman football writer at a tabloid newspaper. She later became known for her incisive writing on athletics.

Vikki died in February 2019 from breast cancer at the age of 56. She was first diagnosed with the disease in 2007 but tumours spread to other sites in her body and she was told it was incurable.

Despite the diagnosis she continued work as a full-time sports writer for The Sun travelling the world to cover events and was a strong advocate for women in football.

Vikki – who carried the Olympic Flame on the Torch Relay leg between Barnsley and Kexbrough in 2012 –said her journalistic flare began with the Blades.

She said: “I wrote about Sheffield United. That’s how I got into football. My dad used to take me. I went into news reporting. It used to be much more structured. I did a university degree, then I did an NCTJ course back in Sheffield and papers would then recruit you from there.”

Their biographies are among 247 of people who left their mark on the UK and who died in the year 2019.