You know you're an Old Skool Football Fan when..........

Modern Football is a bit rubbish, a bunch of prima donnas prancing about the pitch earning £100,000 a week, no player loyalty, the television coverage may be better but we're now over saturated with the game and the pundits analyse the game to within an inch of it's life.Players spend more time on the front pages of the newspapers with stories of drunken nights out and affairs than on the back pages where they truly belong. Modern times do make us cynical, but I'm an old skool football fan and the following will help you find out if you are too.

On The Pitch

 

1. You remember when Ray Wilkins had the middle name of "Butch", not sure why, but he did. Maybe it was an ironic nickname? Maybe he's anything but butch in private? His nickname after last week's Champions League Quarter Final is of course now Ray "Stay on your feet" Wilkins.
2. Players could pass back to their own 'keeper and he could pick it up, wonder around his own area for about half an hour before finally deciding to kick it up the field straight to his opposite number in the away goal. Classic football!
3. Moustaches on footballers, back then they were proud to show their maleness through their facial hair, nowadays it's all bum fluff and shaven eyebrows.Barton he may not bring a lot to the world of football but he did try and bring the 'tache back this season........bless him.

At The Ground

1. Standing at football. Just think, there are experiences at football that the youth of today will never experience again at the top level. One of those was being crammed in like sardines on the terraces, getting to know your fellow supporters a little too intimately sometimes and have someone piss in your pocket.

On the Box

1. Saint n' Greasvie, two names that will mean very little to the young football supporters of today. But they were the Morecambe & Wise of the punditry world.....ok maybe that's pushing it, more like the Cannon & Ball! But with coverage of football and cameras right up the player's noses (Wayne Rooney) don't you wish we could go back to the more simpler days of analysis? "He stuck out his leg and there it was on the back of the net", "Over the Moon" "Sick as a parrot". We've all watched the game, do we need to still be discussing it from every imaginable angle four hours later?
2. FA Cup Finals were better in the late Seventies early Eighties that is a fact. But so was the coverage, the day was always sunny and it was on both ITV & the BBC so you had the choice of Brian Moore or John Motson. The coverage seemed to start at breakfast time and TV had full access to the teams, even on the coach! But more than most efforts Sky can throw at us these days, it was entertaining.
3. Following your team home and away if you couldn't go was much more of a challenge. The majority of households have Sky today and Jeff Stelling and the boys have become a staple for the armchair fan on a Saturday afternoon. But when you were younger following your team and getting news on all the actions took a bit more effort and imagination. Grandstand & World of Sport with Dickie Davies would give you a half time and full time round up, but other than that you were pretty much in the dark as to the progress of your team television wise. The other options were to listen in on the radio, provided you could get a decent signal of course and as long as they were covering your game or for the die hard fan there was ceefax, it was kind of like one of those old computer adventure games, with your thumb hovering over the refresh button waiting for the scoreline to change in your favour. But that was as old Roy Castle used to say dedication!

Away from The Game

1. For your weekly fix of footballing news, when the back pages had too many words and not enough pictures Shoot & Match were the schoolboy magazines of choice (apart from the ones you found in bushes over the park!) they offered all the latest gossip from your heroes as well as full page pull outs of your favourite teams in all their pre-season group photo glory. At the start of the season Shoot also gave away those league ladders things that no one ever kept up with and actually used....

2. Got, got, got...........NEED!! The familiar playground cry as your mate thumbed his way through your wad of Panini stickers that you didn't NEED!! yourself. Collecting football stickers was up there with conkers, knock down ginger & British bulldog as a favourite pastime in those hazy lazy days of childhood. When we were younger the footballing world was a smaller place and the latest packet of Espana '82 stickers offered a treasure trove of shiny club badges or new players with unpronounceable names and amazing facial hair from exotic named places like Algeria, Iran and Wales.....
Some of those stickers were like the equivalent of Willie Wonka's Golden Ticket and that was where the wheeling n dealing in the playground came into play although by just looking on ebay it seems that not every kid got into the spirit of things as you can get yourself a full set of unused Espana '82 stickers for over three hundred quid...........you can bet it was the smelly kid with the lazy eye who never actually filled his book.


So Modern football = rubbish or possibly I've got my rose coloured spectacles on again?
What are your favourite football related memories of growing up?

 

 

"You are the ref "was another staple of schoolboy magazines and they've recently been updated. The answer to number 2 is, if it's Gary Neville getting punched in the face you either hold him down so he can be hit or join in!