CASES of individual footballers going on strike to force through a transfer are plentiful in the modern game – but occasions on which an entire team has taken a stand, as Wanderers did last night in protest against unpaid wages and bonuses, are rare.

The most famous call for strike action in football came back in 1961 when the entire PFA was balloting its members at the Manchester Grand Hotel in continued efforts to abolish the £20-a-week minimum wage.

The Bury FC delegate had just made a speech claiming strike action was wrong, and that his father – a miner – did not earn as much as he did.

Banks’ reply, recited verbatim by the likes of Gordon Taylor, Sir Bobby Charlton and Jimmy Armfield down the years, brought the house down.

“I’d like to tell your father that I know the pits are a tough life,” he said. “But there won’t be 30,000 people watching him mine coal on Monday morning, while there will be 30,000 people watching me trying to stop brother Matthews here.”

His words – and the reference to the great Stanley Matthews sitting a few yards away – swayed the argument back in favour of a strike, which was only avoided at the last moment.

Those efforts, spearheaded by Jimmy Hill and Cliff Lloyd, along with George Eastham’s case two years later, paved the way for better wages and transfer rights.

Some may argue such player power went too far in the cases of Dimitar Berbatov at Spurs, Pierre van Hooijdonk at Forest, Dimitri Payet at West Ham, who downed tools individually to force through transfers.

But occasions on which a whole team has carried through with a threat to strike are almost non-existent, at least on these shores.

In 2011, former Wanderers midfielder Peter Reid was in charge at cash-strapped Plymouth Argyle when senior players threatened to go on strike because of unpaid wages.

The Pilgrims were due to play a game against Burton Albion but some players had not been paid their full wage in nine months.

"We've got bills to pay, houses to live in," said captain Carl Fletcher. "The only leg we've got to stand on really, to make a statement, is probably by not playing on Saturday.

"It's getting to the point that people are going to have to move out and sell their houses."

Fletcher and other senior players did play the game in the end.

In April last year the Republic of Ireland women’s team also threatened strike action after accusing their governing body of failing to provide the team with adequate support, including being forced to get changed in public toilets and sharing tracksuits with the youth squads. Again, a compromise was found.

Members of the Scottish Referee’s Association went on strike in November 2010 after claiming the Scottish Football Association was not doing enough to protect officials from criticism or the questioning of their integrity.

The SFA imported officials from Luxembourg, Israel and Malta to allow four top flight games to go ahead.

Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and Norway’s Tippeligaen have both experienced player strikes, while MLS also narrowly averted a late start in 2010 after a dispute over contracts and the freedom of transfer.

And in January 2014, players at Racing Santander forced the postponement of a Copa Del Rey match against Real Sociedad after the refused to play, having gone without pay for several months.