I watched him week in, week out. It wasn’t just the highlights. I heard Lineker talking about Messi and he said it wasn’t the goals or the big flashy stuff that made him such a generational talent. You can watch him in every game and he will do something magical, seemingly impossible, as if it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Dalglish was that sort of player. It’s just that for the most part, only the highlights still exist.
This, entirely. I think it is more noticeable in the Premier League if anything. Once a player is regarded as being off the pace they are regarded as finished. It rather spoils the spectacle.
You can’t make comparisons between players from different eras. Would a player like Rice, Kane, or Hendo go anywhere with the drinking culture prevalent in the 70s.
I’d like to think Kenny’s natural ability would have been elevated by the fitness, diets, conditioning available today.
Something that may have counted against Kenny was all his formative years were in Scottish Football, which was much more competitive than it is today.
I actually somewhat think that too much focus on tactics and training (practising a move over and over repetitively) has taken something away from the game. It feels like we’re seeing less and less geniuses nowadays than we used to 30 years ago. They are still there probably, but its much more difficult in today’s day to express yourself isn’t it?
I can still name so many players who played back then that I would love to just watch play football, from clubs all over. Now I can barely count five of whom I can say the same.
Sure the game is faster now, but there’s much more cheating in today’s game too, so overall, I can’t say that there’s much difference.
This is the main reason international football has fallen so far behind IMO. The game has become so intricately coached at the top level. That is in itself a skill that players need to carry out that game plan, but that comes at the expense of players learning how to interpret the game for themselves. When you then put a group of really finely tuned players together without time to hone any sort of game plan they lack the intuitive capacity to figure it out. The result is the disjointed, often negative games we see in international football. Back when players had more licence to figure it out themselves the ability to mix a group of top players together and get a coherent performance out of them was much higher.
Sweeting (i think) put forward a theory when Brazil had their Arse handed to them by Germany in 2014
and im not suggesting blow outs (scoreboard) never happened in the past, but it does seem to be that you see some odd results from nowhere…for us for instance this season vs a revitalised Man UTD and even Man uTDs form at the start of the season ( was it Brentford?)…
the theory is that the players are so unaccustomed to stepping away from the plan, that when the plan goes a bit wobbly they have no way to react, they dont know how to…they are drilled to keep running into ‘X’ chanel, keep standing at ‘X’ height…
whether as a souness or a keane would have reshaped the midfield, then told the gaffer
its a fine line, we dont want Hendo deciding when to drop klopps overall game plan…but…
edit; obvioulsy the reference was the players look to the bench for a reaction which may be a longer time coming than instant onfield smarts
Not again, this is the time we have too much time on our hands and we all need to nit pick at minor things . This happens at the end of every season, when we all start arguing.
We need some entertainment on TAN, like a Quiz night or something until pre-season starts.
