8/18/2023 0 Comments Kick it like![]() As I return to my sedentary life, I inventory the insights framed by twelve months of training. ![]() This is admirable.Īfter this little experiment, I still can’t kick. If anything, Casboult is a hero, a player who has made so much with so little, and dares to improve under the gaze of hundreds of thousands. Of the eleven players drafted, he is the only one to remain at Carlton, most of the rest existing in a post-football life. Recruited in the bowels of the 2010 draft (pick 44, Rookie draft), Casboult was a key position long-shot. But we can reframe this.Īlthough considered the best key forward Carlton has (as well was being the totem of their struggles), Levi Casboult was never meant to achieve these heights. Death, taxes and Casboult kicking behinds for Carlton. ![]() Casboult survived to sign another two-year contract. Some alchemy was created between Casboult and his kicking coach, former AFL forward turned NFL punter Sav Rocca. He didn’t change his ball drop, suggested by many to be the key problem. Maybe it was an altered swing of his leg or the picking of some mental padlock. He finished the 2017 season with thirty-four goals, up from eighteen the previous year. Whilst I was on my drop-punt vision quest, the unexpected started happening in the real world. (Is that why the best footballers seem so painfully dull?) Or maybe it’s best suited for the intellectually subnormal, the best mind being no mind, the walking brainstem. It might be a task for the mental maestro, conducting your conscious and unconscious from an impossible third vantage. It feels like connecting a dodgy printer to a wi-fi network. But it is stupefying how difficult it is to consciously control. It pales in comparison to the complexity, the hundreds of micro-movements of say, aeronautics. Kicking is actually simple, oppressively so. I had missed all ten shots caught on video, folding under the pressure of a single camera. I finished the afternoon with twelve goals and seven behinds. Approaching the fifty metre arc, I had eleven goals and needed nineteen. Maybe a simpler kicking action would help. I was confident in how strong my legs were getting. I panicked, going back to the two-handed drop. Minor corrections became over-corrections. Then the kicks started going out to forty metres. I heard the camera click into a tripod behind me. It was the limit of my distance with the new ball drop, but I had nailed similar kicks in practice. Next came a cluster of three kicks thirty metres out. If I nailed most of my close shots, I was in with a chance. Casboult had kicked just eighteen goals that year. I was hustling around the goal square, hoping to capitalise on momentum. Then the first six kicks became the first six goals. He would photograph and video my shots on goal for posterity. I’d start with short kicks to build confidence, just like I’d practised. Longer kicks would employ the traditional drop. Every kick under thirty metres would get a two-handed ball drop. This is what happens when you support Carlton and slowly lose your mind.Ĭonditions were optimal on the day of the challenge. But which year? Coming from a background of school soccer, I’d want to compare myself to his worst year (Casboult had errant years, but 2016 had been especially dark). I could repeat his kicks and aim to kick a better score. But how would I do it? The key to any plan is setting specific, measurable goals. Shit, could I kick better than Casboult? Well, yes. Kicking for goal in Australian Rules seemed like free-kicks with no goalkeeper. Why is kicking so hard for footballers? I played soccer growing up. He should get a physiologist, a psychologist, an exorcist. He should drop the ball lower, crouch lower. Bloated ex-players fell over themselves on television to provide solutions. “Shit, I could kick that,” I say, a statement maybe not completely absurd. Although with Casboult, it is a state of permanent winter. It’s other key forwards, it’s Joey Daniher, it’s Darcy Moore. Casboult has a kicking problem, but the problem is not his alone. Then I watch Casboult wobble a nine-metre kick to score a behind and I am reminded that watching Carlton is not about excitement, but about unrelenting pain. Levi Casboult is the closest thing Carlton have to a Coleman-winning forward, which should be very exciting. Two metres tall, Casboult’s body isn’t a body but six writhing anacondas. A Levi Casboult contested mark is very exciting. I watch Levi Casboult take a mark in the goal square.
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