Goalkicking has been in the spotlight this season - no more so than when Collingwood kicked 4.17 to lose to St Kilda in round three, despite the Saints losing Nick Riewoldt in the second quarter.
And while Roach - who kicked 607 goals for the Tigers in 200 games and was part of the 1980 premiership side - suggested that today's forwards probably didn't do enough goalkicking practice, he pointed out that the game had changed considerably in the three decades since he finished.
"We barely got out of the goal square," Roach told afl.com.au, "so were we ever out of breath? No, and very rarely were we out of the 50 metre arc."
Roach explained that it was not uncommon for modern forwards to mark the ball in the back pocket, then sprint forward before marking again at full forward in the same passage of play.
"By the time [the modern forward] goes to kick he's got to catch his breath and get his routine organised, where I suppose we, and especially someone like Peter Hudson, wouldn't have moved out of the goal square," Roach said.
"And now you've only got 20 seconds or whatever it is, and the umpire is counting down, whereas we all took our time - caught our breath, thought about how to do it, which way the wind was blowing and where to kick it.
"I haven't played for 20 years or so, but there's certainly a lot more gut-busting running than we had in out day.
"Now you have Brian Lake running forward and having shots for goal, but very rarely - unless you were playing on David Dench - would that happen with us."
Roach said that despite the archaic-sounding training regimes of the day - training three nights a week after work, kick-to-kick on Punt Rd Oval as the warm-up - he ensured he worked hard to maximise his chances of doing his job properly.
He said when he first arrived at the Tigers in 1977 the backmen would kick out from the goal square at training and the forwards would mark it and kick it back through the goals.
Roach said he would have 20-30 shots at goal before training and would have more practice after training had finished.
"I'd also go down on Wednesday night - which was our day off - and grab a bag of balls and kick 60 or so balls from various angles, then go and collect them, put them back in the bag and go to a different angle and do it all again from 40 or 45 metres out," Roach said.
"I did that all through my career, because I knew that sometimes you'd only get a few kicks a game, but if you kicked 3.1 or 4.1 you'd have done your job for the team."
And in the days of man-on-man football - before the advent of flooding and zones - Roach said it was usual to be kicking from a far better position than lots of forwards these days.
"They used to say 'keep the key clear' and nobody get in between centre half-forward and full-forward, because that was my space, where I was supposed to lead," he said.
"We had that area, and more than likely we'd be kicking from either dead in front or around to a 45-degree angle.
"Only towards the end, as you got slower, did you go towards the boundary line, but I think these days it's the only place you can go, because you've got four or five blokes standing in front of you."
Roach also could not understand the current method of running the ball along the ground when kicking at goal.
The method famously came unstuck for St Kilda's Stephen Milne in last year's grand final when he tried to run the ball along the ground from 40 metres out only for Matthew Scarlett to scoop it up and run out of the back line.
"I don't know (why they do it now) - we never did it, we'd always kick it in the air," Roach said.
"I was saying to (former Hawk and Lion) Andy Gowers this morning that if you tried that at Waverley it'd get stuck in the mud and could get stuck or could go anywhere, so we'd always kick it in the air.
"It's like they don't want to kick the ball out of the ground, but we used to kick it as far as we could, then stand around while they went to get the ball back."
