AFL / John Harms / 03 June 2010 / Leave a comment Bet Now

In the week the AFL snared one of Rugby's youngest talents, John Harms considers the prospects of leaping the sporting fence.

When I was about ten, we moved back to Queensland.

I had been born there but then spent a few years in the footy heaven that is Victoria. I was footy nuts. We knew a little bit about rugby league: that they threw the ball and that there was mad tackling. Once or twice we played crazy rugby - like games on the yum-yum weed that was the second oval at Gowrie St primary in Shepparton.

We knew nothing about the division of the rugbies, and certainly nothing of the straight teeth of private schoolboys and the straight rights of the wild forwards of rugby league.

We knew a bit about soccer and Billy Bond and Brian Moore's Match of the Day. Soccer was easy to understand.

Where we lived on the Darling Downs, very few people took much notice of the VFL. It was aerial ping pong and the talk in the Western Line and the Commercial was rugby league, and especially local rugby league.

I did what boys in Oakey did: I joined the Oakey Bears Under 12s where the traditional skills were taught. Kicking was pretty primitive, with a hand held under the football and the ball dropped and kicked in a weird sort of torpedo punt. Drop kicks were rare in kids' football, but you would see them in matches from Brisbane and Sydney on ABC TV.

I was the kid who could catch, and I used to take the kicks for touch once they saw that my drop punts went pretty straight and just far enough to get over the touch line.

In my first year there I went to the A-Grade Grand Final at the Athletic Oval in Toowoomba. The sell-out crowd had spilled on to the ground and we sat not far from the touch-line.

When Dicky Rose kicked for touch, I sensed the ball was coming straight at me from about 40 yards away. I stood up to watch the towering punt and it did come to me. And I marked it. Sort of half on my face, half on my tiny chest. I hung on to it. I got an instant fat lip (in the days before asthma when kids still got fat lips and chilblains and warts).

The reaction to a tiny kid taking a catch like that was amazing. I got praised for my courage! I got praised for my skill to take such a catch! I didn't tell them that most kids in Victoria would have done the same thing. It was, after all, a simple chest mark.

That's what kids in Victoria did.

Since then, the marking and kicking skills have crossed over from footy to the two rugbies. And equally, footy has taken from rugby the techniques of tackling and herding.

You now see fine exponents of the drop punt. Darren Lockyer learnt to kick it from his father who played footy at Mt Gravatt . I suspect Laurie Daley learnt the skill down on the Barassi Line around Junee and Temora where footy is played on Saturday and rugby league on Sunday, and quite a few blokes back up.

Israel Folau has signed with Greater Western Sydney. When you watch players like Folau (Greg Inglis, Darren Lockyer, Karmichael Hunt and quite a few of the rugby players like Will Genia), you see that they have the hand-eye coordination, the running and evading ability, and the power to perform well at any sport they'd take on.

I have seen Folau climb above packs as if he has played footy all his life. When he has the sit, he knows how to put that shin across his opponent's iliac crest or on his shoulder and get the ride. He took a couple of absolute rippers in one state of origin match a couple of years ago.

But I've never seen him kick or hand-pass.

You'd have to say though that if Myke Pyke and some other footy novices can make their way then you'd expect Folau and Hunt to make a go of it. Apart from obvious natural talent, what they do have is performance at an elite level, which means the mental strength is there, although mental strength is not without context.

But I'm not sure any of that matters too much anyway. The AFL with its buckets of dosh will certainly be cashing in on the reality that many a Queensland and New South Wales household will turn their TVs to Channel Bruce out of sheer curiosity.

And that is worth squillions.

And as for his position: I can see Folau at centre-half forward, or even on the half-back flank.
He could be anything.

I just wish the recruiters had had the good sense to look at cricket.

Imagine Roger Harper as a key forward.

Viv playing on Diesel Williams in the guts.

Thommo on the ball.

The mind boggles.