Quote Originally Posted by thehumblegringo View Post
In terms of pure quality the Man City vs Spurs 2nd leg was one of the best games of football I have ever seen.

The quality of the attacking play by Man City and the speed and cleverness of Tottenham in transition was off the scale.

I have watched football since the mid 80s and the speed and quality of the game now is on another level.

How people can make the accusation that people like De Bruyne, Hazard, Sterling, Mane, Silva, Eriksen etc are robots is beyond me.

As I get older and the mob mentality at football has ebbed out I find myself going to football to enjoy watching players do things I could only dream of doing rather than my sole purpose of going to football being to watch my team win and I can honestly say I am far more likely to see exceptional footballers at our stadium now than I was 20 years ago.
The contrast between the Spurs team in their recent away games in the Premier League and what they did away from home in their last two Champions League matches is startling and, daft as it may sound, I think there is a case for leaving Kane out of the Final even if he is fit.

Regarding robotic players, I believe they are more "programmed" than they used to be in that the overall plan is now all encompassing, but I'd agree with your point about the individuals you mention - the best managers and coaches are still prepared to allow individual expression to flourish within their "system".

Nevertheless, I stick to my point about the standard of defending not being as good as it once was. In many ways of course that's a good thing, but it would be interesting to see how players such as Baresi, Maldini, Scirea, Cannavaro, Blanc, Thuram and Passarella (with the exception of the last named, they were all footballers as well as defenders and would not have suffered much because of the lessening of the amount of "physical" defending allowed these days) would have coped today.