Former AFL consultant Ben Perkins can’t believe clubs’ lack of investment in the art of goal kicking, insisting his methods could improve teams by five goals.
But that’s if any club is bothered to pick up the phone.
Perkins, who has worked with Port Adelaide, Essendon, the Wallabies and more, says he doesn’t understand why AFL clubs haven’t picked up the phone to work with him.
“This is a question that I don’t understand,” he admitted to SEN Breakfast.
“I went to New Zealand and came back and I thought every cub in the AFL would call me up and they didn’t and I don’t understand it.
“I’ve got the artform down to the most simple procedure you can get, I’ve refined it and refined it and it is so simple and so easy and every week on the football I watch the players do everything wrong.
“Goal kicking is very much based around getting the run-up right. If you get the run up right, everything flows… you can make errors and still kick the ball pretty straight.
“But if the run-up is wrong, any other mistake you make is enhanced and you miss.”
Perkins believes Harry McKay’s goal-kicking woes would be “really easy” to fix and declared Aaron Naughton’s action in front of the sticks “terrible”.
As a big advocate for the importance of the run-up, he stated: “No player is hard to fix. Once you know how to do it, you can do it. It’s not hard, it’s easy.
“When I hear people saying, ‘he leans back here…’ it’s all total garbage, they don’t understand what is going on at all.”
Only one player who kicked over 50 goals in 2023 went at over 62 per cent accuracy in front of goal. That man was Nick Larkey.
In this year’s finals series, Melbourne cost itself twice with accuracy in front of goals, Carlton arguably got lucky on two occasions and Collingwood only triumphed by four points in a Grand Final where it had nine more scores.
Perkins, self-admittedly different operator, explained that the proof is in the pudding with his methods.
“I think Jarryd Roughead comes to mind because he was missing from 20 metres out,” he stated.
“I did five weeks with him kicking nearly every day and at the end of it I looked Alastair Clarkson right in the eye and said, ‘Alastair, he’s going to be better than good, he’s going to be fantastic’.
“He then won the Coleman Medal.”
He added: “I really enjoy the company with football players, I get on very well with them and the players I’ve coached, I’m still friend with them today.
“All of the payers I’ve dealt with, I’ve had a long-term friendship with them… I don’t fail. The players I coach do not fail.
“Look at Michael Hurley at Essendon. I had two sessions with him, he went to Perth and kicked six goals, he’d been missing.
“The following week he kicked five. Then be broke down and the drug scandal broke, I thought I was going to be at Essendon for 10 years.”