Quote Originally Posted by laddo View Post
Whereas back in the day you could take someone out at the knee with no real attempt at going for the ball and you'd get a quick telling off or if the referee had balls a yellow card at worse.

That hard man potentially career ending challenge (can't really call it a tackle) resulted in the player being labelled as a hard man and celebrated.

Untrained physio runs onto the pitch to treat the injured player with a magic sponge and some cold water.

Great times
I don't know if it's just me, but it seemed that we had less injuries. We certainly didn't seem to get so many niggly strains etc - they probably just carried on! In my first season (71/72) I could almost name the team every week.

Defence was:
Brindley - 41 games
Needham - 32 games
Stubbs - 43 games
Worthington - 46 games

In addition,
Bradd - 46 games
Jones 44 games (12 as sub)
Masson - 45 games
Nixon - 46 games (3 as sub)
Brown - 43 games (keeper)

I doubt we will get 8 players who average over 44 games each now.

Remember that on top of those games, Jimmy Sirrel would play full scale games in training every week (and there were reserve games in the league too).

In 70/71 when we won the league, 8 players played more than 40 games and another 3 played 37 each.

We used 17 players all season and 4 of them played 14 games between them.