I am a grumpy old git fast approaching 52 and have an old-fashioned view of the world, just like my late father did when he was approaching 52. So I’m going to stick my neck on the line with the world sporting web community and say this: Football was a whole heap better in the 1960s and '70s. I have no doubt that the enlightened Sportingo readership will be calling me much worse things than ‘grumpy old git’ but when you have something on your chest…

So let’s call the '60s and '70s ‘my era’. I still love the game today, but it is nowhere nearly as good as in my era when men were thugs, pitches were the mud equivalents of minefields and 230,000 people would cram into a tiny stadium for a fourth-round FA Cup ninth replay. This was an era when players were, er, players, and not brand names manufactured by PR companies, it was a time when you knew where you were; games would start at 3pm on a Saturday and finish at 4.40pm; Cup ties were played in packed stadia and it cost the equivalent of a bag of chips to stand on the terraces to support your team.

There were no moron-talking-to-moron phone-ins, no agents, no sports psychologists and no football stories making the main news-bulletin headline. There were, however, great players – in my view better than the prima donnas who pass for footballers today. In my era we had George Best, Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Moore, Jim Baxter, Gordon Banks, Jimmy Johnstone, Norman Hunter, Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles, to name but a few of the hundreds of stars of the time. And when you think of the European talent like Florian Albert, Sandro Mazzola, Helmut Haller in the '60s and the great Soviet and Dutch club teams of the '70s, not to mention the glorious Brazilian 1970 World Cup squad, there was plenty to get excited about.

Football then was a much more simple game, and that is exactly my point. Football is a very simple game and the modern game, with its intricate formations and patterns, is nowhere near as good. That’s why the likes of Ryan Giggs, Cristiano Ronaldo and Theo Walcott are so precious, because they are rarities.

In my day, every club had a tricky winger turning a hapless right-back inside out; Ralph Coates, Ian Storey-Moore, George Armstrong, Albert Johanneson, the list is endless (I will never forget Leeds’ Eddie Gray bamboozling Sunderland’s Cec Irwin at Roker Park in 1970. It was like the circus, a juggler leading the clown all over the shop). And to show such skills on quagmires passing as pitches was nothing short of miraculous. It’s certainly very rare to see a player taking on a defender in such a manner today. Even the great Arsenal teams of the past decade have preferred a more clinical approach to goalscoring.

When you take the simplicity out of the game, you isolate the fans who are attracted to it because of its simplicity. It seems to me that down the pub these days, if you are not some kind of tactical guru who understands 4-5-1-1 or deep this and deep that, you can’t take part in the football chit-chat.

Football is not high culture, it is a mass spectator sport for people to enjoy. In my era there would be no argument as to where it is better for Steven Gerrard to play, right-midfield, centre-midfield, deep-lying, moving forward etc etc. He would have been as great a player then, as he is now, but he would have been given a much less rigid brief before the game.

Of course, the litmus test is whether today’s stars could have cut the mustard in my era and vice-versa. Now there’s an interesting debate. How would the likes of Didier Drogba and Thierry Henry have fared on the mudheap of Derby’s Baseball Ground with Dave Mackay crunching in with the tackles? Could George Best have got through a well-organised Arsenal defence today?

What do you think? Let Sportingo have your views.