I can remember listening to a couple of old codgers lamenting the state of Welsh League football as I warmed up before a game some thirty or more years ago – can it really be so long! I smiled to myself. Things are never what they used to be when you get older. Now I find myself in the old codger department I look back and things were different then. Better? I don’t think so. Worse? No, not worse, just different.
L.P. Hartley wrote in the beginning of “The Go-between”: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” The football culture of those bygone days was perhaps different: defenders would go through players from behind to get the ball clattering them in the process; you got up and got on with it. Was it better? If you were a defender, yes. If you were a forward you learned to jump or limp. My mind might be playing tricks but I think more teams tried to outplay the opposition with craft and invention; every team had its midfield general to run the show and with him was a hard-tackling minder, a tricky winger and a centre forward who headed the ball and anything else that got in his way.
Better? No, just different.
Today, we see teams play the channels much more to try to turn the opposition to create chances. Today, pace has replaced craft as the essential ingredient; there were always quick, athletic players, it is just that the balance has shifted in favour of graft, not craft. The midfield is more congested so battlers are easier to find than craftsmen, the craftsmen flourish in different areas where there is more space.
The game is essentially the same: goals win games, goal scorers are at a premium, it is easier to organise a team to stop goals than to score them, set pieces are always a valuable source of goals and if you concede it is always down to a mistake.
Is it the players who have changed? Some players have different attitudes towards drinking or socialising but there have always been boozers in football, it is just that most successful Welsh League footballers did not go out and get drunk the night before a game, though there are always exceptions. The line is often trotted out that young people have so many more things to do these days; there have always been pubs and dance halls to distract sportsmen and there have always been young women eager to distract young men from the single minded determination required to achieve in any given sport. Dance halls in the fifties mutated into discos in the sixties and seventies and then became clubs. Some players will go clubbing until the early hours, others will make sure they eat the appropriate carbohydrate and protein mix and go to bed early before a game. It was ever thus.
Electronic distractions have certainly proliferated in recent years: X-boxes, Playstations, Wii, personal computers and mobile telephones are all part of the clutter of our lives and some young footballers will spend inordinate amounts of time serving these addictions or, even worse, gambling online late into the night. Is this better or worse than spending time and money in the pub? Footballers have always enjoyed a flutter in the bookmaker’s and there is more chance of winning something there than on the National Lottery.
There is one area where players of all eras are the same: they all want to be in the team. Some players will grizzle, mope and moan if they are not picked; others will take their frustrations out in training determined to prove the manager wrong.
What do managers want of their players? They want them to turn up on time, to listen and follow instructions, to give their best at all times even if they are technically limited and to remember that the team always comes before individual needs. Skill counts, pace helps, stamina is essential, strength a benefit, mental toughness ideal and concentration fundamental: is any of this any different from any time in the past? The answer is obvious. The way the game is played is always mutating as coaches tinker with things to get the slightest advantage to win but the essentials remain the same: good managers find or develop good players, players who know when, where and how to do things.
All of the lonely hours I spent kicking a ball against a wall, crossing, heading, shooting with my mates in the local park, dribbling a tennis ball to and from the school bus or the shop on an errand, juggling the ball to develop my touch - it was all technical preparation for playing the game. Nowadays, all of that is replaced by soccer schools and academies where there is somebody else to ask and answer the questions that help young footballers develop. Is that better or worse? Much depends on the capabilities of the coaches.
There are still young people in love with the game: these are the ones who always have a ball of some sort with them and who will play at the slightest opportunity for hours on end. There are still those young footballers who, like me, can’t wait for the summer holidays to go to the local park and play from nine in the morning to nine at night, only popping home for a snack and a drink and then, when the nights draw in, find a convenient streetlight just to prolong the game a little longer. These may be the players that don’t quite make the grade as professionals who then gravitate to the Welsh League and they are the core of our teams today.
Was it better in my day? Well of course it was for me as I am a product of those times and was created by that environment. Will football have been better for the present generation when they get older? Of course it will. The good old days will always have been better as nostalgia is such a personal thing and it never goes out of fashion.
“Jumpers for goal posts” anyone? Why not!
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