I cannot comment on Purcell like boxy as i never saw him and only clips. But i can count from around 1982 on.
Maurice Fitz, Jack O’ Sè, Matt Connors, Seamus Moynihan, Ja Fallon, Stevie O’Brien, Larry Tompkin, Tomas O’Se, Bernard Brogan, Duirmuid Connolly, Gooch, Kevin Walsh, Padraig Joyce, Brian Dooher, Michael Murphy, Stevie McDonnell, Paul Curran, Pat Spillane, Mike Sheehy were all better than Canavan to name a few. He was a very good player but not as influential as even someone like Dooher over the full period of their careers.
Fitz was/is the footballer other players admire most, certainly from the current era at least. Few enough you could validly describe as regal at their best. Canavan’s best years preceded Tyrone’s peak so that cynical edge in his later years pollutes opinion on him but there was a lovely dash about him in his prime.
Clearly evident divide here between armchair pundits and players fwiw.
No offence mate* but Purcell played in an era when it was considered good technique to throw the ball up into air with your left hand and kick it with your right foot. Gaelic football in the 1950s, was, to be frank, shit.
Which players do you refer to? I doubt there are many in Ulster who would opt for Fitzgerald over Canavan.
In Fitzgerald’s playing career. Munster counties returned 3 All Irelands between two counties. In Canavan’s Ulster counties returned 7 between 5 counties. Canavan absolutely dominated football in a province that was dominating the All Ireland at the time.
There’s definitely a pro-Southern bias in the free state media and they like to put the Southern stars on a pedestal when it comes to these things despite the fact that Northern sides have had the best players.
Another point in case of pro Southern bias. Declan Browne has more All Stars than Paddy Bradley FFS. Bradley was on another level to him, doing it in serious games against serious defences when it really mattered, not scoring a few lovely points in exhibition style games when his team were being filleted.
You Free Staters are awful insecure gorms, scared shitless of the Northern boys.
Goes back to the 60s when Down, led by Paddy Doherty, Sean O’Neill and Jim McCartan, dragged Gaelic football kicking and screaming into the modern era.
Doherty in particular was a forward who would have been up with the best of any era. Down were the first team to use proper kicking technique, for one thing, so in that respect they’re probably the most influential team there has ever been.
The All Stars are a fucking sham FFS. Cunthole journalists who havent a fucking notion sitting round a table drinking bulmers and smoking rothmans putting them up as kingmakers. Gobshites.
Like clockwork, there’s the armchair pundit I was on about, flying in armed to the teeth with statistics. There’s no-one here in the “free-state media”, bar mbb, you’re off fighting a one-man war again.
You can’t quantify what Fitz had, there was an elegance about his football you would give any money for. If you played, you would love to have been able to do the stuff he did. No knock on Canavan. The who’s better argument is redundant, but you can chalk this down as a win if it makes you feel good for the day.
You’re the guy who is saying Fitzgerald is the player most people admire/identify with from recent years. That is unqualified and quite frankly, rubbish. Maybe it’s the case of ye Southern boys as he’s portrayed to the weak as a poster boy but from my experience Canavan is the player over the past 20 years people are in awe of.
