I must have watched different games to you mate.
georgie Best?
Thommo?
St John?
Alec Young?
Jimmy McIlroy?
Charlie Cooke?
Eddie Gray?
Jimmy Johnstone?
Jim Baxter?
Jimmy Greaves?
John White?
Bobby Charlton?
Willie Stevo?
Peter Osgood?
Bleeding hell - I'm drooling all over the fuckin keyboard...
Humm...
To an extent that's fair comment, however pretty well all of these guys had to deal with some terrible stick on a game by game basis.
My main point is that the thread is asking us to evaluate Tommy Smith's footballing skills based on the way we look at football these days and re-frame how he is broadly thought of but both the way football is played & appreciated today is very different than his era.
Tommy Smith way highly regarded as a footballer in an era when giving out stick & being able to accept it 'like a man' was the norm for the day.
All the guys you mention [and I suppose a lot more besides] would testify that they were cut down regularly...and to be fair...dished it out as well.
George Best was acclaimed to be among the best in the world [if not thee best at one time] and I remember him as having a bit of a nasty streak in him when the mood took him.
You don't get to play at the top level of any sport without being good at it...and Tommy Smith played at the top level...but he played in an era when the world looked on through very different eyes.
We can honestly say Tommy Smith was a good footballer but there's no real value in trying to suggest his game [and others besides] was any different than it actually was.
Tommy Smith was a 'hard man', Shankly used it [and encouraged the reputation] to serve our purposes, but that wasn't all there was to him.
We don't need to forget one side of his game in order to appreciate the other.