2 thoughts on “Valentines Day themed team sheet”

1. Valentine’s Day Film. I knew what it was like to play on the ground featured in this film.

   The Mount Evelyn Football Ground is where in 1949, at fifteen years of age, five foot two inches tall and weighing just over eight stone, I started playing open age First Eighteen Football. I won the Second Best and Fairest Trophy for the Second Eighteen with just the first three games of the football season. The rest of the season I played in the First Eighteen, winning the Umpires Vote as best player for Mount Evelyn on three occasions. It was as a fifteen year old school kid that I invented my stab punt so I could kick the ball in all and any conditions on the uneven and often muddy Mount Evelyn football ground. “Valentine’s Day” was made many years after my one year of playing for Mount Evelyn. When I played at Mt Evelyn there was a small tin shed as changing rooms and a cold tap to wash the mud off at the end of the game. About half way through the 1949 football season my family moved from very primitive conditions of candle and kero lamp lighting and no services of any sort. We walked two and a half miles to and from the football ground and four miles to school at Lilydale. We had to go outside the house; such as it was, to obtain water from the tank. It was in these conditions that I perfected my Stab Punt. Half way through the football season my family moved from renting where we lived, two to four miles from any” Town”, to renting the bottom story of a mansion at Brighton Beach with a tennis court, billiard room and a telephone. What a difference. I continued to attend the Lilydale Higher Elementary School. I also kept on playing football in the Mt Evelyn First Eighteen. That’s right traveling by tram to St Kilda. Train to the city; train to Croydon, picked up by taxi to the Mount Evelyn Football ground, then if it was an away game bus to Marysville, Warburton, Healesville, Wandin, Milgrove, Yarra Junction, Poweltown. My elder brother Charlie was also playing with Mount Evelyn so there was always the two of us traveling most of the way together. Somewhere to sleep Saturday night, one way or another, was always found. Sunday was training coaching time so Charlie and I did not get home to Brighton until late afternoon on Sunday. The next year I played as first rover for the Ringwood Football Club in the Eastern Suburban Football League under Captain and Playing Coach, Brownlow Medalist Herb Matthews. I won the Bowling Average for the Ringwood First Eleven Cricket team. That takes me through to sixteen years of age. See Mount Evelyn Football Club web sight under “Jim Johnson Stab Punt” for further info including a video interview.

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2. From research Jim Johnson discovered further confirmation of Dick Lee’s Drop Punt.

   “Forwards today should have seen Lee getting goals in his heyday.
   He got them from the boundary line, and was
   the first player to exploit the accuracy of the drop-punt”.

   Jim Johnson discovered the above ground breaking information re Dick Lee’s Drop Punt in “The Sporting Globe of May 1953 – “Dicky Lee “gamest man to pull on a footy boot” by Hec de Lacy.

   For more information see “The First Drop Punt. Recent research from a kick historian” See on Google
   and
   Almanac History: “George Goninon and the punt drop kick”. See on Google.
   and
   “Stab Kick to Stab Punt and Drop Kick to Drop Punt”. See on Google.
   And
   “DICK LEE OF COLLINGWOOD AND HIS “A TYPE OF STAB PUNT” (DROP PUNT)
   “An amazing secret that almost slipped through the cracks”.

   Researched by “Stab Punt” Jim Johnson.

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