Stoke City legend Mike Pejic takes a football drive by at the former Arsenal manager and his lobbying to the sport's governing bodies

Forgive me for starting this week’s look at life at Stoke City with a takeaway from me sitting in the stands at Everton. I was kindly invited as a former player to be a guest at their beautiful new stadium recently and watch some Premier League football.

What struck me was just how different the game had become watching from that vantage compared to when Stoke were in the top flight a few years ago – and how it is pretty much a different sport to the days when I was playing.

The whole point of football in the 1960s and 70s was contact. As long as it was fair, it was fine. It’s a contact sport and you had to deal with it. When you made challenges, when you headed the ball, you made contact. That’s what the game was about.

It isn’t now. Arsenal Wenger, on the advisory board at rule makers IFAB, has been getting his way with his lobbying over the last three decades and now football has gradually become non-contact by stealth.

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Players can showboat these days without thinking they’ve got a defender ready to pile in on them. The top teams can hoover up the best technical players and they can keep possession without resistance. Harry Kane has been scoring all these goals but there’s no contact like Sir Geoff Hurst had to deal with in his career.

There have been rules which have been good evolutions. It was right to make tackling from behind illegal, just as it was to outlaw tackles going over the ball. They needed to be taken out of the game, 100 per cent. There is still stamping on the foot which needs to be eliminated too.

But there is a skill in challenging for the ball and as spectators, players and managers we are all the worse for that no longer existing.

It is a craft to win the ball back in each third of the pitch. But people sky dive now if you so much as touch their shirt and they get a free-kick for it. It is far too easy for players to buy a foul by going down as if they have been poleaxed.

It is a sin to the art of defending to see players with their hands behind their backs or getting down on their knees to try to block the ball. Some forwards are being encouraged to chip the ball into a player’s arms if they are not tucked neatly away.

Who thinks football is the better for this kind of development?

Then we see teams who are not in the elite few try to copy them. So the ball is worked back to Wales goalkeeper Danny Ward from the half-way line and he casually tries to chip it out to his left-back, giving away a penalty when it goes belly up.

There are players and coaches who prioritise style over substance and forget it takes goals to win a match. It is still a rule, just as it always was and just as it always will be, that most goals are scored following a move of five or fewer passes.

The teams with the best technical players might be able to put 79 passes together to get into the final third but they are still adaptable to win the ball back high up and score with five passes or fewer on a quick transition. People who try to copy them look to the first part rather than the second.

I can’t get my head around a team winning a throw-in high up the pitch and the ball ending up at with their goalkeeper. From Peter Dobing to Rory Delap we have seen the chaos that a throw hurled into the box can cause. Where does it come from not to try that? Get the ball into the area and challenge for it. You might not score from each one but you might win a corner or force a scramble or get a rebound or a lucky bounce – and you’ll get the crowd up and behind you.

Football is a forward-thinking, forward-passing, forward-moving game and that should never change. The second you can play forward with possession, play it forward.

There is a skill in terms of the type of pass you can provide, the angle, is it to feet or into space? But that ability is being sacrificed in favour of a safe pass backwards or sideways. I’m not saying you should never pass it backwards but the aim should always be for it to go backwards to go forwards more effectively. Instead we are just seeing robotic passing for the sake of ticking off a pass.

We are having centre-backs taking goal-kicks so that the goalkeeper ends up with the ball one yard from his own goal. It’s a comical approach.

The conditioning has been so emphatic that players are taking more risks in their own area than at the right end of the pitch. We are losing quick and clever play in the attacking third. We all want to see more passing, moving, creating space, skill and support in attack.

I am glad that Stoke seem keen to buck the trend at least a little and that comes from having control of the middle third with better players in there than we have seen in recent seasons. The wide players can come inside and you get a mixture of options and exciting football.

We need as many players as possible who understand that every action is to try to get your side closer to scoring a goal and keeping the opposition out.