I respect your opinion but disagree with it.

We can all pick on individual instances to illustrate our point of view. Why pick out a player (Eccles) who while great at what he did was not noted for his ball handling skill to compare to one (Lauitiiti) who is noted for that one aspect and little else and is one of the very few exceptions in SL rather than the norm?

It wasn't just in the halves, although Murphy, Millward, Nash, Seabourne, Shoebottom, Hardisty, Hepworth, Topliss, Holmes would all destroy the competition if they were around in today's SL and they were all British.

The centres were more skilfull, the wingers appeared faster, every team seemed to have a ball playing loose forward and often a ball playing prop as well. The 5 yard rule demanded players were skillful as just using brawn was never enough. Nowadays it's more or less all brawn from 1 to 13 (except in the halves), five drives and a kick. Boring and at International level totally inadequate.

Nowadays James Graham passes a ball and everyone swoons like it's something incredible they've just witnessed.

The tackle technique was also appalling, the players in general were slower, not as fit which made everything else much easier

Centres may have been more skilfull, but they werent close to having the physical attributes, the mix of size, strength and speed as a player Keith Senior, regardless of how skilfull they were, Physically they would have been dominated and would never have had the opportunity to showcase those skills.

Whilst the halfbacks may look less creative now, what they are doing, they are doing at 10 times the speed the game used to be, speeds at which the players you have listed wouldnt be able to cope with.

I'm glad you agree as it was a question of the skills within the game rather than a comparison between the fitness levels of part-time, semi pros able to train two evenings a week and a game of full time athletes.

Maybe i wasnt clear,

What i am saying is that the skills shown today are performed at a much higher level, the game as a whole is stronger and as such showing those skills is much more difficult.

It isnt a case of the modern players not having these skills, simply that they cant express them because the defensive technique and the physical fitness is so much better.

Its much easier for a halfback to create gaps in a tired defence, if the defence tires quicker they will have more opportunities, modern defences tire less so there are less opportunities to create gaps, so it becomes a harder skill to create a gap and as such less prevelant which can give the impression that players lack those skills when that isnt the case, it is simply defences(through fitness and technique) are better at stopping them.

The main difference between 70s and now in terms of skills is that the modern players' skills are largely taught by coaches. In contrast, those of the 70s' players were self-developed to a greater extent. On the one hand, this means that the amount of errors made by current players is a tiny fraction of the number made by their 70s counterparts. The downside is that many of the modern players lack the originality and creativity of those from way back, having effectively been taught exactly how to play.

I believe a similar effect has been observed in snooker where players such as Alex Higgins have been superceded by a generation of coached players of a much higher standard, albeit lacking in the idiosyncracies and unpredictability of their predecessors.

Erm, don't you get all prissy with me when I address other posters in such a dismissive, forthright manner? Now who is being all "look at me, I'm the big dong of the forum"?

Back OT, I agree with TVOC. I recently had a romantic evening with Bullseye. before I drugged and violated him we watched some rugby DVDs from 1990-1994. The game was harder, and dirtier. The players were smaller and less athletic. However, the skills on display were far better than we see these days.

IMHO of course. I do hope you don't verbally abuse me for expressing it. I might weep.

Its always very dangerous to compare old players with new, the game is so very different. The players in the 60's etc would simply get monstered today. Why? Because as I said, the game has moved on. I could launching into a great spiel about evolving fitness and nutrional advice etc... but people get it - sports people are fitter these days, and stronger, and faster. Skill is different, but without the rest its largely irrelevant.

The point of the thread is about ref's and what Im saying is that the days of biff should be long behind us but due to a lack on conviction by on field refs and then the review panel its not. Stronger refs and discipline would allow players to get on with playing the game. Thats the point - not how old I am or how many times a player got sent off in decades gone by.

The biff will never be behind us IMO, purely because tempers will always be lost for as long as the game enjoys its current physicality.

when you are comparing 2 different eras of the game you have to take into account law changes and fitness improvements amongst other things
theres no doubting todays players are bigger,stronger and faster than players from the 70s but i dont think todays players could play the modern game up to 4 days a week as they did back then
those players were made fit for that eras game and every player knew how to exploit what looked huge gaps compared to todays game where speed is paramount

A few things I remember from that evening before Gareth's Rohipnol kicked in was that the games from the early 90s were surprisingly fast, and pretty much as quick if not quicker than SL games now. The PTB was much quicker and there was less of an obsession with the ruck area. Teams lined up much deeper and had a greater variety of set moves with the ball often being switched or using runners running imaginative lines. It was a world away from SL where we see all the teams using the same dull set move.

At Division 1 level there's no doubt that defences were looked less organised at times but teams had to use skill to break them down rather than brawn. There's no doubt that kicking skills were better with players able to kick the ball further and make it stand up in goal more easily. At test level with defences more organised you'd expect a more sterile game but that wasn't the case. I think the game nowadays has gone from being skill orientated to brawn orientated, largely due to the introduction of the 10m rule. It's easier to train a big athlete to get a quick PTB and win a penalty than to coach skills. That is gradually changing but when you look at the lack of skilful British players in the game over the past 10/15 years you have to wonder about how the game has developed and what coaches have done.

The other thing that struck me was that just about every other play the ball back then would be penalised for foul play now. There was a sly dig in almost every tackle yet this very rarely led to a reaction from the player, ref or crowd. It seems over time we've become used to seeing less and less of this so now a player like Bailey gets a heap of attention for what would be nothing at all 20 years ago. While this may be fine in the hyper sensitive and PC world we live in it's far less entertaining.

It's a different game with some significantly different rules shaping the contest.

The modern game is much more a battle of possession and territory, in part because the scrums are virtually uncontested and more or less guarantee possession to the non offending side. That promotes a safety first, conservative approach where possession has to be protected almost at all costs. That has produced a breed of automaton players incapable or unwilling to chance their arm. They are generally dissuaded from trying anything with any risk attached, unless it's in the dying stages where caution has to be thrown to the wind. Hence the five drives and kick approach we see for 90% (guessing) of each game in SL.

I don't mind the way the game is played, I've adjusted to it over the years and still enjoy it but I find it a far less skillful game to witness.

Well put and an opinion I share.

Indeed, borne out by coaches obsession with completion rates.

I disagree.

Clearly the rule changes have had a big effect, but fitness, technique and tactics have been just as important if not more.

I watched the 78 cup final between leeds and saints the other and noticed how many tackles were one on one and how many were around the chest area and upper body. But also how few actually went to ground. In this day and age that kind of defence would be blown away via offloads(which is one area of skill which has unarguably improved imo) but also the size, speed and strength of the players these days mean that kind of tackle would be brushed off.

I believe that some of the skills of 20-30 years ago were only useful because of the poor quality of fitness, technique and tactics and they wouldnt work today not because of the rule changes or a more defensive strategy but because players defensively are better and space is harder to earn.

I dont disagree the strategies are more negative, but i think we go in cycles where an attacking tactic gains prevelance so a defensive stragey is needed to combat it, that defensive strategy then gains prevelance so an attacking strategy is needed to to combat it, that then gains prevelance and so on. Right now i think we are seeing more attacking play and we are at the start of an attacking cycle

The snail eating, garlic stinking surrender monkey that the RFL employ is the biggest invertebrate to enter a professional rugby pitch.