Further to our previous post focussing on Nick Riewoldt’s new goalkicking routine, we had the chance to watch him at fairly close quarters on Friday night — great effort, Bombers!. He only had one (or perhaps two?) set shots during the game, but we were watching closely during the Saints’ warmup before the game.

We think he’s basically on the right track, but the follow through action of the leg is somewhat exaggerated — as it would be for someone who is embracing a ‘non-natural’ action.

The additional area that might still need focus is to ensure that his eyes are actually open at the point of impact. We noted that the set shot taken during the game missed the target by a considerable distance.

To return to the golf analogy we used in the previous post, we find that we have an instinctive reaction to blink right at the point of impact of the golf clubhead and ball.

When we blink, our success rate is way less than 50%, however, when we can convince our eyes to stay open right through the impact, our success rate (the ball flying straight and true in the intended direction) is approaching 100%. It goes without saying that even this incentive does not keep our eyes open!!

We also made the point about open eyes to Matthew Knights last year when the Bombers had the ‘yips’ in front of goal.

There’s some pretty interesting research just waiting to be done here.

We’ll take a hefty punt that current Bomber and ex-Hawk, Mark Williams, renowned for his sharpshooting, has his eyes firmly open and on the ball as he kicks for goal.

AussieRulesBlog has been aware of some discussion over recent months of goal kicking. Some commentators have opined that kicking for goal is perhaps the one area of AFL that has not developed with the increased professionalism of players over the last decade and a half.

Bringing that discussion to mind again are articles in todays Hun commenting on St kilda captain Nick Riewoldt’s refashioned goalkicking routine.

In his newly-unveiled routine, Riewoldt intentionally does not look at the target once he has commenced his run in.

AussieRulesBlog is particularly interested in this routine. We wrote to then-Essendon coach Matthew Knights when the Bombers seemed to have a whole-of-list case of the ‘yips’ a couple of years ago.

In that letter, we drew Knights’ attention to another ball game — golf. It is a maxim of golf that the player watches the ball right through the moment of clubface impact. We know from our own occasional efforts at the game that achieving this feat increases the likelihood of an acceptable shot by around 10,000%. On the other hand, looking where we expect the ball to be (mostly before we’ve hit it) increases the likelihood of suicidal thoughts by the same 10,000%.

The simple fact is, both hitting the golf ball and kicking a football are exercises in hand/foot/body and eye co-ordination. That extraordinary organ, the human brain, is able to manage incredible precision if it is not distracted. Looking up to see where we’ve hit or kicked the ball distracts it!

It’s no surprise that the Hun article draws a contrast between Riewoldt and Travis Cloke. Cloke’s inaccuracy is legendary. Barcodes supporters can often be heard muttering murderous thoughts as Cloke misses yet another ‘easy’ shot.

Cloke has a fairly ‘organic’ goalkicking routine. He leans back at the point of contact and, as a result, his ball drop is unpredictable at best. Lance Franklin is a similarly ‘organic’ kicker. By contrast, the forwards with 1000+ goals (or nearly) — Lockett, Dunstall, Ablett, McKenna, Lloyd — invariably are upright and watching the ball onto the boot as they kick.

We mentioned at the outset some opinions that goalkicking had not kept pace with other advances in player professionalism. Perhaps this can be explained by the penchant in the last couple of decades for recruiting athletes who could play a bit of football as much as physical conditioning coaches limiting goalkicking practice by  getting players off the training track early.

Sadly, AussieRulesBlog is old enough to recall the kicking segment on World of Sport where the legendary Bruce Andrew was a judge and commentator on the show’s kicking competition. As we recall, a straight runup and a straight ball drop were among the keys to effective and accurate kicking.

We think Riewoldt will see a significant improvement in his conversions percentage with this technique. We also hope that others take note and develop their own versions of the routine.

January
Who can forget the fallout from the Blues’ players pre-Christmes ‘booze cruise’? Club culture was our constant companion through a very quiet month.

Reports of AFLPA draftee induction camps gave us hope that, eventually, we shouldn’t have to endure the infantile antics of AFL footballers.

Later in the year, 18-year NFL veteran, Brett Favre, demonstrated this is a forelorn hope with his ‘sexting’.

February
As we prepared to get into the semi-serious stuff of the pre-season competition, the AFL gave bloggers a late Christmas present by revealing its so-called staging sanctions. Confusion reigned with almost everybody expecting players staging for a free kick in a marking contest to be free kicked or reported. Hardly anyone took the trouble to watch the video and understand what the AFL actually intended.

Temporary Saints recruit, Andrew Lovett, who already hadn’t managed to hit it off with his new teammates, found himself facing a rape charge and his new club finding him guilty without the benefit of a trial.

As the pre-season comp got underway, there was plenty of controversy with an apparent video referral of a scoring decision resulting in the goal umpire’s call being overturned. Field umpires had got straight back into stride by paying free kicks based on what they thought had happened rather than what they’d seen and, following the lead of Stephen McBurney, keeping their whistles on a hair trigger.

March
As the FFA seduced some sections of the AFL world with deals to upgrade regional stadiums, the Saints descended into amateur hour with the most inept handling of a grievance against a player in AFL history.

The AFL umpiring department announced their somewhat hilarious sponsorship by spectacle retailers, OPSM, and then proceeded to umpire sensibly — to everyone’s surprise!

Finally, the season proper got underway and we had a bit of a rant about how media select BOGs.

April
The AFL’s long-standing desire to make the game more attractive was thrown into chaos by the proliferation of ugly milling packs where everyone was frightened to take possession of the ball.

We lauded Western Bullgog, Bob Murphy, and his old-fashioned notion of respect for opponents and the Magpies–Saints clash provided a gilt-edged example of disrespect. Not only that, but three other posts focussed on this game. In the meantime, Brendan Fevola managed to tick off another couple of deadly sins on his personal bucket list.

We penned another instalment in our campaign to remove The Giesch, this time for inflexible interpretations.

Melbourne Storm managed to outmuscle every other sport in the world for press column-centimetres for a few days.

May
The month began with us berating Jeff Gieschen. That was a surprise — not.

Some genius at the AFL decided the Demons and the umpires would look spectacular in (nearly) matching uniforms for the Breast cancer game. Demons players couldn’t find their teammates on the field and kept handballing to umpires.

Speculation bubbled along concerning the next big NRL convert to AFL (and will Greg Inglis now make it another?), Jeff Kennett inserted his foot firmly in his mouth over the Ben Cousins doco, followed in close order by senior coach Alastair Clarkson shooting his gob off.

The rushed behind rule became interesting with about sixty thousand definitions being flung around, none of them being one of several employed by the AFL umpires. We finished the month by writing off St Kilda, in the wake of Riewoldt’s hamstring and lamenting the demise of respect and sportsmanship on the AFL field.

June
The holding the ball rule, 50-metre penalties, the advantage rule interpretation, and Jeff Gieschen, occupied much of our attention in June, along with Stephen Baker’s mauling of Steve Johnson and chief umpiring zealot, Steve McBurney’s hair-trigger whistle.

July
Co-operative goal umpiring that still couldn’t get the decision right was in our sights as July began. But we managed to focus on non-umpiring topics as well!

Modern players’ penchant for dribbling the ball through for a goal caught our attention and indicated to us that these players are just show ponies.

Confusing and inconsistent Match Review Panel outcomes gave us some grief, while the emergence of Michael Barlow as a star for Fremantle suggested to us that home-grown, ‘mature’-age recruits would be a better bet than international fancies like the Bombers’ Irishman, Michael Quinn.

Mark Williams’ sacking by Port Adelaide brought to an end to his death of a thousand cuts, while debut umpire Corey Bowen’s five first-half 50-metre penalties against the Bombers had us almost apoplectic with rage. We didn’t have long to wait for retribution as Bowen didn’t feature in the list of umpires for matches played the following week!

Meanwhile, Jeff Gieschen fantasised that his charges umpired “to the DVD” each and every week! Yeah, sure Jeff, and we’re a dead ringer for George Clooney.

The AFL allowed a police-check armband for the Hawks and Saints, but no such leniency for the Bombers and their Clash for Cancer.

Einsteinian concepts of curved space were employed to justify Lance Franklin’s ‘natural arc’ when kicking for goal, to allow umpires not to call play on. Truly one of the more breathtaking rationalisations from Gieschen’s mob for the year.

August
Surprise, surprise, Steve McBurney and over-zealous umpiring caught our attention at the start of the month, but not quite as much as the huge cast we found encasing our left wrist and forearm, courtesy of a fall. A nicely snapped radius bone in what the medical fraternity know as a Colles fracture.

Jeff Gieschen, ignoring previous indiscretions by his charges in making scoring decisions, suggested talk and consultation would be more effective in weeding errors out of goal umpiring than an extra goal umpire at each end. We must conclude that goal umpires are extraordinarily well-paid, since the AFL seem incredibly reluctant to employ another eight of them!

Finally, the talk began that James Hird would replace Matthew Knights as Essendon coach. As we now know, Knights was gone by the end of the month and Hird was being very coy. Smoke? Fire? We remain unconvinced by the denials of preplanning.

September
We highlighted the MRP’s failure to act against blatant staging when Jarrad Waite lodged an Oscar-worthy entry against the Swans, while the AFL world debated the merits of free kicks that are “technically there, but . . .”

An exodus of almost biblical proportions at Brisbane in the previous summer and the failure of the big name import to have a meaningful impact on-field left the club looking rather sickly.

And then there was the Grand Final entertainment — a highlight of our year. This year’s baffling progress of the Premiership Cup from a tethered hot air balloon, through the hands of Tom Harley, to Peter McKenna and ‘Cowboy’ Neale was underwhelming in the extreme.

Fortunately, as we now know, the game itself lived up to all the hype and more. The Saints were a bee’s dick away from breaking their drought, needing only a mildly eccentric bounce of the ball for Steven Milne to goal in the dying seconds and secure the game. Instead the ball bounced at 120° and we were back the following week.

In a fitting finish to the on-field year, in the drawn Grand Final, emergency umpire Steve McBurney spent more time on the field than most of the players.

Oh, and, quite unexpectedly, James Hird was appointed coach of the Bombers, in case you missed that news!

October
Of course, the Grand Final replay imposed footy on October even more strongly than usual, with the ’Woods downing the Saints in no uncertain terms — sadly. AussieRulesBlog has no great affection for the Saints, but any day that Collingwood loses is a good day.

In the biggest jaw-dropping moment of the year, Saints coaches nominated perennial ‘rabbit-in-the-headlights’ Zac Dawson as their best player in the grand final replay.

Bomber Thompson left the Cats, taking the media world completely by surprise, and the impact of expansion teams on the Gold Coast and in Sydney meant we’d have a six-ring circus for the first round of the pre-season competition.

November
Once again taking everyone by surprise, Bomber Thompson was announced as senior assistant to James Hird at Essendon.

A trickle of assistant coaches leaving St Kilda became a flood, leaving coach Ross Lyon to book a telephone booth for the footy department’s Xmas party.

December
The FFA’s soap bubble of optimism for hosting the World Cup was unceremoniously burst, leaving Frank Lowy and Ben Buckley wearing egg makeup.

The Demons released their ‘cutting-edge’ new uniform, to a general yawn, Gary Ablett Jnr let it be known that Bomber Thompson’s problem was that he was trying to coach the football team and, just for good measure, the AFL announced another slew of temporary rule changes for the pre-season competition — some OK, some laughable.

And that’s how it was at AussieRulesBlog for 2010. We look forward to having our regular readers back for 2011 when, once again, we’ll prick a few balloons and renew our campaign to Release the Giesch!

Happy New Year and have a safe, enjoyable and productive 2011. Go Bombers!

Without having seen the much-publicised photographs of Nick Riewoldt ‘un-clothed’, as it were, we can’t make any specific comment. But the Taiwanese animation was pretty funny.

Regular readers will, we hope, forgive us for being to the point, so to speak, on this issue.

If, as claimed by Riewoldt, these pictures were taken by Sam Gilbert, what were they still doing on his computer? And how did a 17-year-old know the files were there, and then get sufficient access to his computer to be able to copy the files.

There’s clearly more to this than meets the eye — perhaps unless you’ve seen the pictures. . .

Oh, what a tangled web, Nick.

Regular readers will know that we at AussieRulesBlog are long-time Bombers fans, so it’s important to state at the outset that this post is not (intended to be) a case of grandstanding after a victory.

We wonder whether, after a stellar 2009, the Saints can again scale those same heights.

We look back at the experience of Essendon’s Matthew Lloyd, who was never the same dominant player after tearing his hammy from the bone.

Nick Riewoldt’s injury would appear to be less severe than that extreme (Lloyd’s), but nevertheless is likely to restrict his famously high in-game workrate to at least some extent.

What makes Riewoldt’s absence more troubling for a Saints Premiership tilt is the failure, so far, of his teammates to step up to the breach.

We are firmly of the opinion that the secondary effect of Riewoldt’s absence — after the loss of his possessions and presence — has been the Saints’ remaining big forwards suddenly finding themselves matched against a better class of defender. It’s fair to assume that the opposition’s best tall defender would normally go to Riewoldt, but is now pitted against Koschitzke (or Fisher or Goddard).

When the Saints’ game style was already under attack as opposition coaches developed strategies to combat it, the loss of Riewoldt’s lead-up presence and strong contested marking has left the Saints somewhat leaderless up forward.

The writing had been faintly visible on the wall later in the 2009 season when the Saints lost two games, but has blazed into full view as Riewoldt’s absence in 2010 suggests they will struggle to maintain the same game style and intensity.

The big question will be how well Riewoldt heals and how close to his former output he can achieve. His expected return later in the 2010 season can hardly be expected to produce much more than increased morale, as he’ll be severely underdone for match practice at least.

As each year passes, and Riewoldt’s body ages, his output and impact on matches would be naturally diminishing anyway. Factor in this serious hamstring injury and the fall away will be more pronounced.

Can the current Saints win a Premiership without Riewoldt? Three losses in four weeks would suggest they can’t. Can they win with Riewoldt-lite? It would seem to be unlikely at best. It’s unfortunate that this most effective example of the benefits of the AFL’s equalisation strategy should have run up against what may yet turn out to be as good a team as the competition has seen in its history.