The Fox Footy jury debates which was the best decade of football: the 80s, 90s, 00s or 2010s
It’s a time-honoured debate. But as we spend our days in isolation watching ‘flashback footy’ on Fox Footy from the glory days, it got us thinking … which is the best decade to both watch and play? We asked three former players who know best.
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As we spend our days in isolation watching flashback games and live recalls of footy from years gone by on Fox Footy, it got us thinking.
Which is the best decade of footy to watch?
The hair-raising 80s, the high-flying 90s, the hotly-contested 00s, or the Hawks-dominated 2010s?
We put it to this week’s Fox Footy jury to determine their verdict.
DERMOTT BRERETON
I’m a kid who was born in the mid-1960s, so the first time I was aware of what Australian rules football was was the early 70s.
By the mid 70s and late 70s, football for me was the most exciting. I thought they were mythical creatures, AFL/VFL players.
Phil Carmen, Sam Kekovich, Sam Newman, Bruce Doull, Robert Walls … all these great champions of the mid to late 70s — they were just mystical, and we didn’t have a great saturation of coverage, so anything I got as a kid, I clawed onto that and just treasured the VFL landscape.
I think, though, that the best football was probably somewhere between the late 1980s and the early 90s. Say, from 1988-1993.
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Even though most of the players were semi-professional — though not myself — they spent as much time out on the ground training with their skillwork as the current-day players do. There’ll be people that say that’s not true, but that’s 100 per cent true. I know that for a fact. They spend more time at the club now, and spend more time preparing themselves and in meetings tactically absorbing what the battle plans are … three times the amount of time on the sport of football.
But for actual ball-in-hand, out on the ground, time in the gym … we probably overtrained.
If you’d said you were going to bring Pilates into the club, you’d be traded off to the next club who’d have you, and with no mention of any talk of Pilates.
With the ball in hand, we did more. Our skills were pretty good. We weren’t forced under pressure like they are now for every kick to hit, because we didn’t kick short all that much. But that made for quick football, roll-on, play-on, kick it down the line and your timing to get on the end of it had to be an art form.
It made for quick football, one-on-one duels and that was football at its most beautiful.
DAVID KING
The era of the full forwards, which would be the early 1990s to mid-90s.
You had your real star factor in the forward line — one person just destroying a game.
We’ve all talked about Gary Ablett Snr and Tony Lockett, but there was Tony Modra, Wayne Carey and John Longmire, Adrian McAdam, Allen Jakovich … just people that could kick bags.
I was a defender, but I do love watching forwards. We all go to watch them, to watch teams score and to watch highlights.
You’d say that 50 per cent of the highlights in our game come from forwards, and of the next 50 per cent, 40 per cent of that’s probably from midfielders.
No one really goes to watch the backmen, and I’m happy to concede that today.
BRAD JOHNSON
I go across a bit of a few of them. In the 1980s is when I really started to love the game.
But I really enjoyed it through the 90s and 2000s, not just watching but playing in it as well.
Playing positional football was just sensational.
It was great fun, and you always had a direct opponent that you knew you had to try and counter on the day.
To be a part of that system through the 90s and 00s, it was great football to be a part of.
Seeing some of those battles, and you might have even had the traditional tagger back in the day taking on the best midfielder, and obviously the big key forward versus the key back, or the full forward taking total control of their direct opponent.
I was a Bulldogs supporter as a kid, and I loved it.
You had Hawk (Doug Hawkins) on a wing, and when Granty (Chris Grant) was 17 or 18 and kicking 50 goals in his first year, I was 13 or 14.
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He was just unbelievable … how good is this guy?!
Then a few years later, I was running around next to him and couldn’t believe it.
The way that the game was set up then was just brilliant to watch. It’s what I grew up knowing in terms of how the game was played and then was part of the evolution, but I certainly enjoyed the footy more then.
Originally published as The Fox Footy jury debates which was the best decade of football: the 80s, 90s, 00s or 2010s
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