Anyone will tell you that Australia is "a prison island hidden in the summer for a million years", or so said the band Icehouse. Being in isolation which amounts to a kind of solitary confinement, all of the animals, all of the plants, and even all the people both indigenous and imported over the past 236 years, have all gone quite a bit mad. It follows that the very particular kind of football invented and developed in Australia, roughly sort of kind of almost inspired by Marn Grook, which is so old that it predates Association Football by 2 years, which is so old that it predates Rugby by 12 years, and which is so old that it predates American Football by 61 years, is also quite a bit mad. It is quite fitting that we have a mad mad kind of football played on a mad mad island continent.
To describe Australian Rules Football to someone who has never seen it before, it is like a weird version of kick-to-kick, with 18 players per side, on a cricket oval, with no such thing as offside because that would be impossible for one referee to police. On top of this, you are only allowed to punch the ball around or kick it. There is no throwing the ball. It is as if someone with only a vague idea of what they wanted football to be, kind of made up all the rules as they went along until everyone agreed that it was about right. As this particular mad mad kind of football didn't need to take instruction from anyone else in the world, that's not too far from the truth.
As I said previously. you are only allowed to punch the ball around or kick it. Punching the ball, also known as a handpass, is pretty obvious; so it more or less solidified immediately. Kicking the ball is another matter, as there are in fact a number of subtly different ways to kick a football. When it comes to kicking the ball, the most efficient way of doing that which has been refined over the last 50 years or so, is the drop punt. A drop punt will not go as far as a torpedo kick, not will it swing through the air like a banana kick, nor is it as powerfully sharp as a normal punt but for most distances, it is the most accurate; to the point where just about all other kinds of kicks have been made obsolete.
One such kind of kick which used to exist and now does not, is the place kick. The advantages of a place kick are that as the ball does not move, it is far easier to get right. The obvious disadvantage of a place kick is that it is really really hard to get massive amounts of distance on and since the game generally got more spread out as people worked out how to kick the ball further and further, the necessary skill to do a proper place kick withered and faded out completely.
As someone who was born in the late 1970s and after the advent of colour television, the idea that there even was a place kick in Australian Rules Football seems totally buckwild to me. I can honestly say that I have never ever seen a place kick in any game of Aussie Rules ever; and the idea of doing one just seems pointless to me. As an Australian Australian who has played Australian Rules football, I like any decent Australian Australian can kick a Sherrin 50 meters with relative ease. Admittedly I can not kick it as accurately as a professional football player, but I am sure that had I spent my working life kicking a football as my stock and trade of making a livelihood, then I would be far better at it. Nevertheless, even as a relatively poor player of Australian Rules football, I am sure to within a mil of 100 percent, that I could drop punt a football further than anyone ever could place pick an ovaloid football.
Australian Rules Football really came into its own in 1970 when the GTV-9 in Melbourne was finally able to broadcast the 1970 VFL Final to Adelaide, Hobart, Sydney and Brisbane. What makes this game particularly interesting is that apart from being the first proper game to be broadcast in full on telly. is that the place kick, is already entirely gone from the game. There are people attempting torpedo kicks and stabby sharp punts, but nobody attempts a place kick after they have taken a mark. In fact, so strange is the idea to a modern watcher of the game, that neither my dad nor my boss, who both grew up in the era before television, even knew that a place kick was even an option. I would like to say in these cases, that collective memory of what Australian Rules football looks like, is very much shaped by the invention of the live television broadcast.
This means that if you want to see a place kick attempted in an Australian Rules football game, you need to look further and further back into what little archival film exists. One of the problems with this is that Australian Rules football is played on a vast unwieldy cricket oval; which means that the whole visual language of how to film a match properly, is not yet known.
I have found but one still photograph of a place kick attempted in an Australian Rules football game; which as best as I can determine is in a match between Richmond and Carlton at Punt Road in 1929. The ground is positively teeming with life. There is standing room only and as this is almost certainly Punt Road Oval, the teeming masses will have arrived via both tram and train, as opposed to getting to Prince's Park which would have been more difficult to get to. Carlton are playing in deep navy blue, and Richmond are playing in a yellow kit with a black sash which is the reverse of their usual black kit with a yellow sash. I have no idea which match it is. I have no idea who is taking the kick. I do have some idea of what the score is because if you look over yonder, I think that the score is 5.4.34. I do not know who is on 34 points though.
The fact that you have an Australian Rules football player attempting a place kick, with an ovaloid ball, is itself mind warping. With a round ball, you can at least make use of curl and dip if you want it to be sent goal bound. However, with an ovaloid ball the amount of curl that you would get is horrifying. As it is, players make use of the fact that a drop punt can get the ball to loop end over end and this improves accuracy but with a place kick, I honestly have no idea how you'd properly control all of those end points, which can and do act as flight surfaces.
Just an elementary understanding of basic flight characteristics of a ball would lead me to guess very quickly that trying a place kick is a losing strategy. You would only need to attempt this a few times to realise that this is monumentally silly. This only adds to my near complete bafflement at this photo. I can only assume that as this player is near the centre of the ground, that this place kick's only purpose is to try to kick the laces off the ball and give it such a massive thump, that direction is irrelevant. If all you are trying to do is send the ball upfield and have no regard for where it goes, then this might be semi-sensible.
Even in that respect, the drop punt as the most accurate of all the kicks, is a far better idea as the kicker can use their eyes to find loose players and their mouths to bark out words of Saxon encouragement and four-letter abuse to create movement off the ball. A place kick, which is going to be less accurate and is going to develop all kinds of funky flight attitude, is more of a lottery for possession at the other end.
I say all of this in full knowledge of the fact that place kick is used all the time in both Rugby Union, Rugby League, and American Football. The two kinds of rugby are inclined to let the kicker use a kicking tee, whereas American Football has another player set up their ball for the kicker to kick. I do not think that there would be kicking tees in an Australian Rules football game, given the sheer number of kicks in any given match. A place kick is a hideously slow process in comparison to a series of drop punts, which can happen in sequence when a team is trying to move a ball up the field. In neither form of rugby would a team even attempt a shot at goal beyond 50 meters and in American Football a field goal attempt from beyond 50 years is a rarity. Kicking 50 meters in an Australian Rules football game is the bread and butter of every single player on the park from Full Back to Full Forward and all positions in between.
Kicking 50 meters in an Australian Rules football game with a place kick is likely impossible and that's why it fell out of favour. Still, the fact that it existed, although real, is weird.
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