Huddersfield Fans – Past V Present

Are modern day coaching techniques ruining or renewing the game ?

In days gone by most teams would have what was termed a midfield ball winner and a playmaker.

Both loosely used terms because the midfield ball winner was usually a suicide jockey in that it was suicide to stand still for a second with the ball if you didn’t want yourself sythed to the ground in an agricultural combine harvester type challenge. Playmakers were flash harry’s who wouldn’t pass to anyone.

Huddersfield’s great 60/70’s side had ‘Chopper’ McGill, Leeds had Billy Bremner and ‘Bites yer Legs’ Hunter, Chelsea had Chopper Harris, Liverpool later had Graham Souness and the infamous Tommy Smith.

Ball players and flash harry’s abounded with the likes Of George Best, Rodney Marsh, Stan Bowles, our Own Frank Worthington, Alan Hudson, and later Glenn Hoddle and Paul Gascoigne, to name but a few

Every club had at least one of each type,
these were players who new what they were out there for to stop other players playing or to create goals or goalscoring opportunities and it has to be said many made it into their national sides.

Where are these types of players now, the list dries up once you get past the eighties and into the nineties.

Don’t we create talent like this anymore ?
Is it coached out of youngsters ?
Is there no place for these types of players in the modern game ?
Has the fitness ethic replaced these skills ?

Because it must be said many of these players were not the outstanding specimens of run all day and all night players we see now, but they certainly contributed to ninety minutes of football.

Today in contrast we have in some games, high intensity encounters, breathtaking pace, and power, supreme fitness levels, but only infrequently punctuated by true skill, sublime or otherwise.

At Huddersfield we are fortunate to have an academy system that is currently churning out talent that must be the envy of many lower league clubs, that said the debate goes on.

What do you think, are modern coaching techniques and the demands of the modern game killing off some skills, and reducing the game as a spectacle, or is it better now than it was before.