This is simply not true. Pick any game from any week this year and you will see one-on-one contests, high marks and hard hits. What dinosaurs like Osmosis mean when they spout this rubbish is that he can’t get his jollies watching punch-ups, coat-hangers, blood and concussion as part of his footy. This whole romaticising of old-school football never admits that most games were slow, one-dimensional slugfests. The average game of footy now is a zillion times faster. The skills on display in the modern game are incomparable. And it’s still a hard, at times brutal, game that demands courage, stamina, and football smarts.

The pity of this kind of rant is that there IS too much fiddling with the rules. Hands in the Back, for instance, is a terrible rule which makes for the softest of free kicks. But that doesn’t mean the game is soft or that it was better twenty, thirty years ago. Watch some home and away footage from the seventies – not just the grand finals – and you’ll see. Today’s game is better.

Still, it is an acquired taste that I have not acquired at all. A bit like Fosters Lager really.