When I was a youngster growing up, thinking football in England was the best in the world, it used to annoy me when middle-aged blokes moaned about the state of football in the 1980s and how football was a ‘real man’s game’ back in the ’50s and ’60s.
Footballs were rock hard and would split your head open if you headed the ball where the laces were, the boots were great big, heavy clod-hoppers with nails for studs (so I was told), the shorts were long, baggy and called knickers, there were no substitutes, and the players would play on with a broken neck if they had to (Google Bert Trautman).
Players could happily barge the goalkeeper into the back of the net with the ball held firmly within his grasp and the referee wouldn’t bat a myopic eyelid.
The old gits would harp on about the players of the ’80s, saying their hair was too long, mostly mullets actually, or they had “bloody perms like a poodle!”
Their shorts were too short and tight too, although, agreeably, they did leave little to the imagination.
But, looking back, at least the pitches could resemble any old park pitch. With proper mud, some becoming quagmires, tackles could still go flying in, players would get clattered but then get back up again, unless they truly had a leg somewhere up in row Z!
Cup matches would have replays, and no one would moan about too many games in a season, also, while on the subject of cup matches, the big teams would still field a field of international players against a smaller team, not a team of reserves and wannabes like now.
The keepers had a three-step rule to stop them from strolling around the area, and there were terraces, which always seemed to give the game more of an atmosphere and where you could jeer the people sitting up in the seats.
You didn’t have to sign up with an ID number to be able to pop along to any match you fancied going to, just turn up on the day, pay your admission to get through the turnstile, which never needed an extra mortgage to buy, and stand along with your mates and a few thousand others to watch the match.
Ok, so there were not so great parts too, Hillsborough, the Bradford City fire, Heysel, being banned from Europe because ‘only the English’ had hooligans.
But all in all, it wasn’t too bad – not like it is nowadays!
I mean, no terraces, although it’s alright for Europe to have them, and new grounds keep popping up which seems to reduce the atmosphere at a game.
Players diving and falling around if anyone even lightly touches them, and they fall down like they’ve been hit with a ton of bricks, moaning to the ref to try and get an opposition player sent off, lightweight footballs that dip and curl, managers and players refusing to even shake each others hands.
The same old teams reach the cup finals and win the league year after year, with the exception of Leicester of course – but that was a pure one off!
Technology is now also involved at the top of the game, with goal-line technology and the Video Assistant Referee.
And matches are on virtually every day of the week, even if you’re mad about football, which I always have been, it gets too much sometimes.
It makes you wonder how things will be in around 30 years time?
Will association football become a non-contact sport?
Will they have android referees who have all the VAR and goal-line technologies programmed into them as well as assistant referees with laser beams to double check whether a player is offside or not?
In fact, could there be an android team?
Or a world league, with players and fans jetting off around the world?
It’s all too scary to contemplate anymore!
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