Best decade for watching football.

Football is always it's most magical when you are a child and your imagination runs wild. For me the late eighties early nineties were the best but the standard of football is always improving so the present is the best it's ever been, the future will be better.

Your probably! right Blackbeard about the standard of football, but the pleasure comes from much more than just that.
It should be a drama, sometimes a comedy and sometimes a tragedy. I often feel that the clubs are only interested in the result now and not the performance.

Manusince52. Definitely agree it's a much more cynical money/win at all costs kind of game these days. Back in the 50/60s you could go the match then after go the pub and the players would be there socialising with the public. There is a disconnect these days with the money involve.

Football is always it's most magical when you are a child and your imagination runs wild.
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This is just so true. Your memory plays tricks on you and you just remember things as wonderous and new, but when you become an adult, go regularly and understand how the game works exactly, the magic that first captivated us all just becomes routine.

For reasons I can't divulge my love of football began not on the terraces but in the arms of my old grandpa.

With the fire crackling and the comforting smell of oak gently swirling through my senses my grandpa will relive old stories of great molineux nights.

I could hear the roar of the crowd, feel the chill of a cold Tuesday evening on the terraces and taste the coarse unforgiving leather.

Here, in my mind, men fought and conquered and as the grass grew longer and the days of my childhood seemed forever a distant past, I would often quietly reimagine the days of football as it could be, as it should be.

Finally, I saw my first game from outside my mind and with each dive and corruption of the game my fonder memories my grandpa supplied faded only to be replaced by a reality that no matter how much I try and romance will always remain a vacuum for emptiness and withdrawal.

Now I sit with my child and he in turn hears the crackling of disassociated youth releasing fireworks in the distance and the smell of discontent with all world that provides so much variety and so little substance.

It is here I recall the stories of my grandpa and not my reality.

I'm going to make a case for the last 4/5 years where we've seen in my opinion the greatest club side ever in Barcelona, the greatest international side ever in Spain, the greatest ever player in Messi and we are about to have a World Cup on Brazil which will be phenomenal.

People get all wrapped up in the past but it's not too shabby now either.

I have this Lowreyesque memory from when I was 9.

I was stood outside the Molineux on a cold November night when Wolves were playing Real Madrid. Losing 2-0 at half-time the pure noise from the 30,000 capacity South Bank was incredible, like the opening barrage from the Somme, as Wolves scored 3 times to win 3-2.

But my main memory is of the steam rising like a fog from the South Bank, a fantastic sight I can still see in my minds eye.

I started going in the late 70's with a few mates from school. Standing right in the middle of the kop. It was physically hard work trying to stay on your feet a lot of the time, particularly as we were only little kids. Great team back then, lots of great memories.

First time I went to Liverpool I went on the Kop, late sixties I think, Tommy Lawrence in goal.
Incredible.

Tommy 'The Flying Pig' Lawrence and his understudy John 'Tubby' Ogston. They were the days