Football/life nostalgia: Love or hate. (On and off topic)
I was just thinking back to when I first started getting into football and remembering all the good and bad times.
Basically a nostalgic look at it from what I think it was all like from my point of view to how much things have changed for the better or worse.
Even chats among friends and acquaintances produced some fairly interesting debates about what was really good or bad and how much some of us sort of big up the older times as opposed to latter/present times.
It's like my own mother and father and even grandparents would say: "Ahhhh, the good old days, things were much better then compared to now", whether it was football or whatever.
The strange part of it, is how we all see it from being a kid to being an adult and then being over 50, in my case.
It creates a good old argument between people who will hold different views on how things were for them, against someone of similar age having a fairly different outlook.
Naturally this can all depend on upbringing and a so called class divide with some of us, but in the main, I think the majority of us were more or less cut from the same cloth in many ways.
Was it the good old days or have we embellished a lot of it to throw stories to our kids, the same as we were thrown the stories from our parents and them from their parents.
I just think back to being a kid and young adult at Newcastle games in the Leazes or Gallowgate where I spent 99.9% of my time.
The crush and the swearing and what not which I actually enjoyed as kid and young adult.
I also took it as part and parcel being peed upon as we were leaving the ground in the push/crush.
Then the fights and ability of some to throw glass bottles at someone's head and what not, without ever been took to task over it due to no surveillance to identify. And so on.
All seemed par for the course as the youngster in me and the young adult that I grew into. But now, I wonder about it all.
Then watching the clattering of players and cheering rather than wincing and wondering whether one would be out injured with a bad toe or dead leg but rather, knowing 99% of the time they would be playing the following week or even mid-week.
Compared to now where a touch is enough to blow a whistle. Or a fall is enough to have a player miss a week or two.
Players having pie and chips and peas before a game after half a gallon of beer the night before, as opposed to a small meal of tuna salad or pasta and an attachment to every known body wire there is, coupled with all mannerisms of scans in later times.
There's millions of things to add.
Where the so called good old days really as good as we all made them out to be and was it the same for our parents and their parents?
Anyone fancy chirping in?
