Forever Blue With Ian Cheeseman

One of the games football fans like to play, and I’m as guilty of this as anyone, is to compare great players from different generations.

It’s always been regarded as impossible to compare teams, managers and players from different eras, but hey ho, let’s start with the players who are regarded as the best the game has ever seen. 

My suggestions would be Pele, Johan Cruyff, Maradona and Messi as the foreign players with Bobby Charlton, Colin Bell, Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews and Paul Gascoigne the English representatives I’ll put forward. Already I can sense that you are disagreeing with the names I’ve selected, but that’s the fun of playing this game isn’t it? 

You can have the same debates with coaches/managers. Alex Ferguson, Bill Shankley, Joe Mercer, Matt Busby or Brian Clough from the UK or Johan Cruyff, Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola or Arsene Wenger might be the challengers from oversesas. Once again I can hear your complaints and the names in your head that I’ve excluded or that you don’t feel deserve to be among my suggestions. 

Let’s try great teams and this time I won’t differentiate between nationalities. Though I never saw the Real Madrid team that won five successive European Cups in the 1950s, they must have been special. United’s treble winners, Bayern Munich’s 2013 and 2020 treble winners, City’s domestic treble winners (or centurions), Arsenal’s invincibles, Barcelona’s time when Messi emerged alongside Ronaldinho, Deco, Eto’o, Iniesta and Xavi or the Brazil World Cup winners in 1970. It’s tough isn’t it. 

One of the reasons it’s as difficult as choosing your favourite child is the huge changes that have happened to the beautiful game down the years. Stanley Matthews had to deal with defenders who would try to unceremoniously chop him down whereas when Messi tries to weave past defenders he knows they dare not touch him because of much stricter refereeing, which has made physical contact less prevalent. VAR means that defenders can’t try underhand tactics to stop creative players. Less cultured stoppers of a bygone era like Norman Hunter, Jack Charlton, Claudio Gentile or Gennaro Gattuso wouldn’t be as successful today. 

As I watched the 2021 Manchester City team, do what they needed to do against West Ham on Saturday, I wondered about the comparisons between the City teams I have watched down the years. Last week Colin Bell would have been 75 years old. The player he’s most often compared to, in this current team, is Kevin DeBruyne. There’s no doubt in my mind that both players can truly be described as great players. 

In Colin’s era the pitches (and balls) were much heavier. The Maine Road groundsman, Stan Gibson, was sometimes instructed by coach Malcolm Allison to flood the pitch to make it more difficult for the opposition. Colin would still be able to glide over a playing surface in that condition. Back in 1967, one of the great games City fans still remember fondly, was the so-called “ballet on ice” during which they played on a frozen, snow covered surface. They beat Spurs that day by taking their studs off to expose the sharp metal spikes which could gain better purchase on the slippy surface. Can you imagine that happening today? 

We now come to the type of questions we all like to ask. Would Colin Bell have got in this City team? Would Kevin DeBruyne have been as effective in 1968/69? Is the City team currently storming the football World, and capable of winning an unprecedented quadruple, the best there’s ever been? Is it better than Mancini’s or Pellegrini’s City? Is it better than Joe Mercer’s City? It’s fun to think about it. Despite win after effortless, perfect win this season, I still look back more fondly on previous eras. On the Bell v DeBruyne debate I‘d suggest that neither could have simply dropped into the other’s team though I still think Colin Bell would have fitted in quicker to the modern era. 

I told you this subject would create debate. You’re dying to disagree with me now aren’t you?