Today’s
game has been reduced to kick-to-kick, the simplified choice of flat punt and
torpedo. Lamentable is the vanishing of classic kicks. I sometimes think that
the place kick is the missing link, a clue to the origin of the game, dug into
the earth. Those old men, young then, they’d line it up and boot it through,
out of the ground. Dead now, who were kicking back then. Whether from a mark or
free, the player placed the ball in a small divot made with his boot. The skill
was to meet the ball with the toe at the best angle for height and accuracy.
This process today would be called a delaying tactic, as well as bad for
ratings, and it was due to this slowing of the flow that the kick phased out of
use after 1910, together with lace-up guernseys and knickerbockers. Contra
Blainey, it is sensible to keep an open mind about adaptations from Indigenous
sport, though given the game’s perceived hybridity, the place kick may have
been borrowed from rugby. Its demise suggests that 100 years ago players and
spectators already relished a faster game. Closely allied to the place kick is
the drop kick, point of impact being at ground level as the ball lands from the
hand, or bounces. Some of the most spectacular kicking in the modern game was
drop kicking, made by men with nous and bravura. Which is why it’s inexplicable
that the term has come to be an insult for a stupid or hopeless person. I note the
term’s similarity to the insult ‘dipstick’ and comic legend ‘dropbear’ as clues
to this irrational connection. Erasure of the drop kick came about when nervous
coaches forbad it as too risky: for every awesome flight trajectory there was
another that bumbled along the ground, the term here being grubber. There are many
who remain unimpressed by the grubber defence, especially those who remember players
whose drop kick was their most natural form of play. The drop punt is nothing
but an excuse for a drop kick, disregarded with contempt by those who lament
the golden age of kicking. Unsurprisingly, there were also major practitioners
of the stab pass. This low, fast kick was once a feature of any game,
especially as delivered by a rover, itself a team position that is disappearing
like the Cheshire Cat. Dainty little punts between players are nowadays a
charming way of passing the time, but will never match the incomparable stab
pass. The name describes the action, a moment that in a flash changed the tempo
of the game, lifted the spirits and the roar of the crowd. Alas, this ghost of
the past has given way to an age in which teams play up to the easily gobsmacked
with variations on the banana kick, or check-side, a farcical new term that
seems to have been lifted from snooker.
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