Richie J

If this goes ahead I'd love to see Pacman give him a good battering. Although I'm still a bit bitter about him beating my all time fave, Morales, I really dislike Mayweather. Could be a very, very good fight like.

Oh absolutely, I doubt foreigners are treat any better in England than in other countries. Just the other week one of my Poertuguese colleagues was telling me that her brother, who lives near Blackpool I think, has had to move their seven year old to another school cos all the kids at his last one were calling him Paki... didn't know what to say when she told me that - for some strange reason I felt personally responsible. Almost said sorry!

Haha aye that sort of thing used to happen to me loads when I lived in London... I've got a strong accent and musn't look particularly English, and the number of times southerners mistook me for a foreigner was beyond a joke. They usually used to think I was French for some reason, which I was none too happy about, but I've had German, Italian and Norweigan as well off the top of my head.

My reservation about him becming a centre mid was the fact he used to play with his head down most of the time - you can get away with that on the wing but not in the middle. Definitely got the work rate for it though... Don't know til you try though, so I was definitely in favour of giving him a shot there before he left, just to see. I still think 13 mil was too much to turn down though. Pity we didn't make the most of that money. I hope he goes on to do well, he seemed like a decent lad.

To be fair, I've experienced that feeling of superiority with just about all of the other Europeans I've been in contact with, either professionally or personally. Italians, Germans, French (especially) and Spanish, they all seem to instictively think they are just plain better. It often seems linked to the notion of "Brits abroad", getting tanked and behaving badly up on their holidays in Benidorm etc...

There are definitely pervading mentalities in different countries, no matter what anyone says about us all being the same, and there being good and bad everywhere (which of course there are). I've lived and worked in France, and worked with Germans. I'd far rather work with Krauts... I just got fed up with how rigid the Frogs are. Totally unwilling to consider that there might be a better way of doing things than the one they are used to. The Germans will just do what they need to do to get a job done, and they'll usually do it very well. Also, and this really does sound like a stereotype, but they are usually straight up and say what they think, which was often not the case with their Gallic brethren. At the moment I'm working with Portuguese, and that is pretty much following any stereotype you might have of them - a laugh a minute, completely genuine and helpful, but always at least 6 months behind schedule! And could they give a rat's arse? Could they fuck!

Maybe the difference is conditioning, rather than fitness. Maybe its just semantics like, but players today are better conditioned to go like Bilio for 90 minutes, much more than in the 70s, say. As Brazilianbob says, they are so fine tuned that the muscles are (particularly hamstrings I think) are more likely to go. There is no doubt that the game is faster these days, but that doesn't mean that there weren't individual footballers in the 70s (Colin Bell to use use your example) who weren't as fast if not faster than todays players. I read a good interview with Socrates in one pf the papers last year, where he said that football is less enjoyable to watch (for him) precisely because it is much faster and the players run more and faster. If the players run more and faster, but the pitches are the same size, therefore there is less space available... which means its much more difficult to play the ball into space, and therefore more difficult to come up with a real defence splitting pass, which for him used to be oine of the most beautiful things to see in a football match. The other side of it is, as others have said, that we will never know if the great players form the past would be just as great now, with the same conditioning that the players today benefit from. What I would say is that if 1986 Maradona was transported into any current league in the world I'd bet a lot of money that he would still be head and shoulders above anyone else, easily, even with the faster game. And if he had been training everyday at one of the top modern clubs like Arsenal or Man United, the mind boggles about how good he might have been. Maybe that's not a fair example though, cos he was a real one off. You can use the same logic for the likes of Green, Bell et al, but to a lesser extent.

If you've had enough there's no point staying just for the sake of it. The only reason I always stay til the end is that I don't want to miss anything. You pay so much for tickets these days, it seems daft to risk missing a winning goal or soemthing like that just to beat the traffic.