A little to much romance is placed on 80s players. There were some greats but if they were plonked into today's game, without the benefit of training, they'd get their arses kicked.
If they did have the training and ran as hard as today's players during a game, they'd be stars but they'd also succumb to "tired legs" and the accuracy of kicking would decrease.
Fair point, but era's and game styles are always difficult to compare.
A worrying trend in recent times is the focus on a players athletic ability vs their actual skill as a footballer.
As some keen observers of the game state (rarely the media) there seems to be an increasing trend on recruiting athletes who play footy, not naturally gifted footballers. This may sound like semantics but it's not.
Goal kicking skill. Let's face it, set shots at goals in recent times has been hard to watch. Compared to the same players sublime skills in most other aspects of a match it's hard to comprehend how they can be so incompetent at comparably such an easy skill?
When Buddy kicked 113 goals in 2008 he also kicked 88 points and it's safe to assume about half of those were set shots!
That's just one year of his career with an overall conversation rate of 53% - and if this was just 5% better, suffice to say he probably would have passed 1000 goals years ago....
Last edited: