We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

[treibeis]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

Football was radically different and vastly better by 1974, and a lot of that was down to beckenbauer

By 1974, Beckenbauer had a lot more time on the ball because he had Schwarzenbeck doing the dirty work for him.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

fair enough, but that Great west German/Bayern Team who developed in parallel with the Dutch/ajax total football team were light years ahead of those teams in the sixties, in terms of tactics, organization and team play.

[EIM]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

Passing is for nerds.

[Patrick Thistle]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

In complete contradiction of my previous post, the comments on fitness or otherwise of players in the sixties got me thinking. Just how good would Charlton, Greaves et al be now, with dietitions, sports scientists, trained physios etc etc

The achievements of that generation should probably have an 'adjustment for inflation' type mechanism applied.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

Do you mean an English footballer who was not only able to actually control and play with the ball, but could also charge about like roadrunner for 90 minutes like the modern ones? That's just fantasy.

[tracteurgarcon]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

Dalliance, I'm confused (it's not hard) but if international football is of a lower standard than top club football surely that should mean players such as Rooney should do better rather than worse at that level?

[Borracho]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

I can't be doing with this argument that, because of the contemporary advances in diet, fitness and (let's face it) drugs, a modern-day journeyman is automatically a big improvement on a vintage superstar.

It's an extension of the idea that today's football is increasingly about strength and speed and reaction times and stamina and much-increased levels of cynicism, rather than being, you know, good at doing great things with a football.

Talented though both of them are, the idea that Aaron Ramsey or Oscar is a big improvement on Günter Netzer or Jean Tigana is not one that I'm really buying.

[dalliance]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

Dalliance, I'm confused (it's not hard) but if international football is of a lower standard than top club football surely that should mean players such as Rooney should do better rather than worse at that level?

Players we judge to have been successes at International level are ones who did something notable at a summer tournament - a World Cup, a European Championship, Copa America etc.

Perhaps in past times we would consider qualification performances as more important than we do now, but even so that's like lauding a player for scoring freely in the Champions League group stage rather than at the sharp end of the knock out stages, or scoring in the League Cup but not the Premiership.

Actual tournament games are not that numerous -it's a maximum of seven to reach a World Cup Final and with the standard in the international game not exceptionally high, you might play 2 or 3 actual hard ones in that run. If a club player managed a handful of strong performances over the course of half a dozen Premiership games during a single month, we wouldn't think it was exceptional as we would want to see how the rest of his season panned out.

Let me reference someone like Riyad Mahrez of Leicester City here. A great start but way too early to draw any conclusions from it, yet a similar number of good World Cup performances can make your name for life.

And it's an awful lot harder to play 38 toughish games plus more difficult stilll Champions League fixtures over the course of a season. That's the equivalent of playing 7 World Cups in terms of fixtures. So for Rooney, Messi, Ronaldo et all to have done that season after season for a decade or more is a true indicator of their actual worth.

Then there is the random circumstances factor too of course. Klose and Podolski are pretty modest footballers who were fortunate to be eligible to play for Germany at a time when there were a great number of much better and influential players around them to make them look better than they are. Had either of that pair been English then they would have no reputation at all; likewise had Rooney been German then I'd imagine his involvement in their team would have no adverse effect on them winning the World Cup last year.

This thread has referenced names like Schillachi and Salenko who have made World Cup history because of what they did in a single tournament, or in Salenko's case a single game. I'm sure no-one would argue they were great players in the broader sense. Yet we could name dozens of unarguably brilliant footballers who have no international pedigree for a variety of reasons that did not ever include them not being good enough.

[Satchmo Distel]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

Sometimes a player is just more suited to excellence in international football without ever looking like he'd last a 9 month season: Hagi and Lechkov spring to mind. I wouldn't play them in the Premiership but would love to have them available for a WC or Champions League SF. Sprinters not marathon runners as it were.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

That's not a bad description of Zinedine Zidane in the four or five years after the Juventus pharmacy was raided. A pretty grim world cup transformed by two headers in the final, a great euro 2000 and a great volley in the cl final. Otherwise he was pretty rubbish for a juventus that mysteriously seemed to run out of steam, and he was becoming a stick to beat Perez with on the basis of a very lacklustre first season at real.

[Defensive minded]

We all agree, Wayne is better than Bobby ...?

It's good to see you back dalliance.