The good old days

Good morning, spring chickens!

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how the football used to make me smile. And I knew if I had the chance, I would make the team advance, and maybe even take a feckin' a shot on goal.

Us old-timers always seem to think there's no times like the old times, but as much as I have always loved footy, there was a period where countless big games seemed to contests between the worst possible versions of Mourinho and Simeone, decided by a single goal - if you were lucky enough to get treated to one.

The leading team would proceed to see out the remaining 20, 30 or 40 minutes playing neat passing triangles. Between the two centre-halfs and the keeper. If the opponent pressed high enough, the keeper would pick up the ball and stand there holding it for an age, waiting for the opposition forwards to retreat, and then roll the ball back to the centre-half. After half a dozen repetitions, you'd get treated to a hoof into an area overloaded by the team in possession, whose main objective was to get the ball back to the 'golden triangle'. Rinse and repeat.

The best chance of seeing the ball carried into the opposition half was literally that. A throw-in where the taker would run 20 or 30 yards along the line to take the throw nowhere remotely close to where the ball had gone out of play. But only if it was taken by the side that was trailing. The leading team would do the same in reverse. A 20-yard trundle back towards their own half.

It was painful, the type of eye-bleeding it provoked only marginally better than getting a dart in the eye courtesy of the upper terraces.

The back-pass and six-second rules were perhaps the single-most important change in football I have witnessed in my lifetime. They also offered up great comedy moments of 'keepers panicking at the sight of a ball they had been trained for years to pick up trained to pick and hold onto.

What would've happened to football without those rule changes? Tactics, we all know, change and evolve; managers find ways around tactical conundrums and introduce new systems to counter whichever vein of football is in ascendancy at any given time. But could anything but rule changes have solved the gordian knot of the pass back to the keeper?

Nowadays, our favourite complaint seems to be that of a football that has lost its soul due to the hyper-commercialisation of recent decades -partly a consequence of the fair but competition-distorting Bosman ruling - but what football would we be witnessing today if those changes hadn't been implemented? Would we even still be talking about football as a mass spectator sport? What other aspects of the game back in those days narked you up no end, and what was it that made them change?