I WAS asked recently if I thought that football was much less of a contact sport that it once was and whether that was a good thing.

I suspect Chelsea’s Eden Hazard would dispute it after his bruising encounter with Manchester United in their FA Cup tie, but I am in little doubt that there is less acceptable contact than in the days of players like Nobby Stiles and Norman Hunter.

Michel Platini, when he was Sepp Blatter’s right-hand man at FIFA, was credited with saying that he wanted the game to become a non-contact sport, something that I feel will never happen, even if it was desirable.

The fact that there is lesser contact, brings its own problems for referees.

One is that every time a player gets injured his team-mates demand a free kick, but not every tackle that brings an opponent down is a foul.

A clear example is that if a player plays the ball fairly and then an opponent goes over his outstretched leg, he may fall heavily, but it is not foul play.

There are also two other factors that are not often considered and those are body strength and balance.

Sometimes, when opposing players are running after the ball, one will have greater body strength and his opponent will seem to bounce off him and up go the arms for a foul.

In the days when the Laws were issued as the Referees Chart and Players Guide to the Laws of the Game, players were warned that ‘you will probably be bowled over if an opponent catches you standing on one foot’. A rather crude example of how poor balance can make a simple contact can look bad.

Remembering how Pele, one of the all-time greatest footballers, was kicked out of the 1966 World Cup, what the game’s law makers have been striving towards is to allow skill and talent to flourish.

That’s something we would surely all agree with.