Did ‘Diesel’ Williams do much extra handballing practice to master it? Did Wayne Carey trial running back with the flight at training to make sure he never dropped any of those great grabs he was renowned for? Does Brett Burton spend much time jumping into the marking bag?
I then realised that I had a perfect subject right under my nose.
Alan Didak is regarded as one of the best kicks of the ball in the game. He can spot up a short target perfectly, nail a long bomb from 60m, and also has the rare ability of making his teammates run to a position to get on the end of one of his kicks. I decided to have a close look at him and also had someone count exactly how many kicks he had in that time.
The questions I was asking myself were: How much of his kicking can be contributed to raw ability? How much to a good technique? And how much comes from hard work and practice?
Dids is definitely a bloke with copious amounts of natural talent. In all aspects of AFL (except probably ruck work), he is exceptional.
Not many guys his size can take the marks he does; he doesn’t have a huge leap, just times his leap to perfection using his own and his opponents’ momentum to give himself the best opportunity to take a mark, depending of course on each individual contest.
When kicking, his eyes are always on his hand and boot as he drops the ball – not on where the ball is going, which can be a problem for many, especially youngsters. He can get his boot to the ball very quickly and has excellent balance. Dids also has a unique timing when kicking – it doesn’t look like he is kicking the ball all that hard but it still gets to where he wants it to go, and quickly.
So technique and natural ability do have a big impact on a player's ability to execute a skill to a high standard. But looking at the amount of kicks Dids has per week may also have a big say in his kicking performance.
Over the last week, Dids had 422 kicks of the ball from 10 to 65 metres, including 19 against Geelong. If that is an average week, he’ll kick the ball 9284 times in the home and away season, 2532 times over the intra-club and NAB Cup, and 5908 times over the pre-season. (Pre-season would probably result in more kicks than the regular season because of the higher training load, but I’ll leave the numbers the same).
In one year, Alan Didak will kick the ball 17,724 times – 177,240 times if he plays for 10 years. And that’s not including the hundreds of hours he will spend at footy clinics kicking the ball with future AFL stars.
All of this, of course, is barring injury but you can see what I’m getting at. Like anything in sport, the more you practice, the better you get. And if Dids has to kick the ball over 17,000 times this year to help him get the on-field results, good on him for being such a good kick – he deserves it.
For now though, I’m going to throw the boots on. I have a long way to go if I too want to kick like the best of them.
As they say, practice makes perfect.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily of the clubs or the AFL.
