Messi is better than maradona....

[Skorenzy]

Defenders were not as hard as today!! Wow! I really don't know whether to laugh or cry!

You must surely be too young to remember the defenders from the 60/70/80's. Defenders and midfielders were truly fearsome in those days, don't dismiss that as mere nostalgia Ismail, it was absolutely true. Messi gets knocked about a bit, but he certainly doesn't have people trying to break his legs every game!

Check out Andoni Goicochea or Gentile's treatment of Maradona, at a time when flair players did not get anywhere even remotely like the type of protection they get today. You had to almost axe someone to death before you got a red card in the 60's/70's!

Look at Pele's treatment in the 66 WC. Please do some research Ismail before you come out with crap like that. The organisation is better tactically now of course, but you didn't need as much in those days when you can kick someone 5 feet in the air to stop players, and you did so with relatively little risk of even receiving a yellow!

The game was certainly rougher before the 90s (in Spain in the 70s there were so many leg breaks they slowly started to go to the current state of almost no-contact), but while the overall mentality is perhaps less "hard", I would say that due to the higher degree of physical exertion in games today the strain that fouling puts on players is equally big.

Re: Messi, a lot of the stuff he faces are indeed innocent trips, clips or professional fouls. But in games against RM or with Arg against SA sides he gets a treatment like Maradona would.

Messi survived a (potential) ankle-breaker not too long ago. He was also a few inches away from Del Horno shattering his knee cap when he was 18-19 years old (Del Horno didn't even get a yellow, but later got a straight red for something far less worse).

ps: not picking sides here by the way, just pointing out that nasty fouls do still exist in today's game

 

[Revan]

I am going to post a video (I know that it will not prove anything though)


Some things about defending:

1) Defenders pretty much leave the good players (especially Garrincha) do whatever they want.

2) The defending was abysmal (I bet that in today's third league in England or Italy you see better defending). For that there were more goals, and you saw Pele and Garrincha being marked by only one defender most of the time

3) The tactical part of the game was almost 0. For example Garrincha didn't knew why the players were celebrating after the final, he had thought that they will play (like in Brazil championship) another turn of games with each team.

For that I think that player's stats were better then. Fontene scored 13 goals in a single World Cup, a record which will never be overtaken. Pele scored 100 goals in a season, 110 in an another one (including friendlies) and played in more than 80 games in a season, in many others more than 70 which is impossible for today's footballers.

My last point is that every sport went progressively. In athletics and swimming every year we see records broken, Michael Jordan and Roger Federer are the best ever in their sports and both of them are in the modern era. I don't see how this is not the case for football.

Sorry for going out of topic in this post, cause in the end it is Messi vs Maradona thread.

 

[Gio]

ps: not picking sides here by the way, just pointing out that nasty fouls do still exist in today's game

Well it's the frequency that's changed. Ujfalusi's challenge was something that Maradona dealt with most weeks - as the various injuries he collected testified -ultimately curtailing his time at the top.

 

[Gio]

My last point is that every sport went progressively. In athletics and swimming every year we see records broken, Muchael Jordan and Roger Federer are the best ever in their sports and both of them are in the modern era. I don't see how this is not the case for football.

You've got a point about swimming, but most athletics events haven't seen discernible improvement in many years. In some athletes (mens 400m, 5k, 10k, various women's events) simply aren't as fast as they were 15-30 years ago.

But the human body doesn't evolve at anywhere near the speed that technology does.

Like you said with the doping point mate, if we're discussing tennis then we've got to discuss superior rackets. Just like in powerlifting the numbers have soared, but take off the gimp suits and the unequipped standards haven't really improved at all (assuming of course any sad bastard other than me actually follows powerlifting at any level). If we look at olympic lifting, where the equipment has remained static (ie there is none) numbers have actually went backward. There's very little to support an assertion that athletes are necessarily getting better across the board. In a sport where sport-specific skill still reigns supreme, there's no reason to assume we'll improve from generation to generation.

 

[Snake Plissken]

Why is it you feel the need to talk down Maradona, Pele and co. every time? Surely great players should be admired, not mocked?

I'm not talking them down, and there isn't a footballer I admire more than Maradona.

I just get fed up with all the mythological bullshit that grows arms and legs once they retire, and it seems to get even worse as time goes by.

People always say things like 'Oh my old man has seen Pele AND Maradona and he says no-one comes close to either'. Lets be honest, that proves nothing, people always get nostalgic and what the player of their generation to be the best.

But yeah, not knocking them, I just can hate this crap about guys like Maradona getting assaulted week in week out and the notion that he played with a team of amateurs, and he had the superhuman ability to make these 10 amateurs perform better than they should have done etc etc.

 

[Snake Plissken]

He isn't talking down those players.

He is mocking those that suggest that Napoli was pub team that only was good because of Maradona and those that suggest that there is no difference between how athletic the game has become now compared to the 60s.

For their generations Pele and Maradona were the greatest to play the game, would they have been born at the time of Messi and Ronaldo they might still be the greatest but like many have pointed out comparing them is all based on pure speculation on both ends because the circumstance keep changing all the time.

Not to mention that it is hard to compare players anyways since all of them have strength and weaknesses and were better in some parts and weaker in other parts compared to the other great players.

It's already the same with Messi and Ronaldo imo. they are both outstanding players and it's hard to say who is really the better player and who is more important of their team let alone that the goals both of them score make a lot of people forget that there are other important factors to football that get often overlooked but in the end are just as important to winning games.

this is it really.

It's just silly to sit and say x would have been better than z had he been playing today etc.

Its all hypothetical crap.I'm not saying the greats of today are better, but they're not miles behind.

People will say defenders were much rougher, but then they won't note that todays defenders are more athletic, faster and what not.

As you say, you can't compare players from different era's. I just hate the way some people seem to be able to give definitive answers in these sort of debates.

 

[Relevated]

Defenders were not as hard as today!! Wow! I really don't know whether to laugh or cry!

You must surely be too young to remember the defenders from the 60/70/80's. Defenders and midfielders were truly fearsome in those days, don't dismiss that as mere nostalgia Ismail, it was absolutely true. Messi gets knocked about a bit, but he certainly doesn't have people trying to break his legs every game!

Check out Andoni Goicochea or Gentile's treatment of Maradona, at a time when flair players did not get anywhere even remotely like the type of protection they get today. You had to almost axe someone to death before you got a red card in the 60's/70's!

Look at Pele's treatment in the 66 WC. Please do some research Ismail before you come out with crap like that. The organisation is better tactically now of course, but you didn't need as much in those days when you can kick someone 5 feet in the air to stop players, and you did so with relatively little risk of even receiving a yellow!

maradona used to do flips and shit but still carry on to get the ball occasionally

 

[Suedesi]

Not even close in my opinion. Look at the hard fouls, they were much more common. No rolling around, no surrounding the referee...

In today's football, Gentile would have been red carded within 20 minutes, and you'd have all the Barca players + the bench waving imaginary cards during the lineup