With confirmation that the placekick remains a legal kick in League football 57 years after a goal was last booted with it, could we ever see its like again?

Not since Round 4, 1955, when Fitzroy’s Tony Ongarello dug a divot with the heel of his high-cut and slotted a goal on Brunswick Street Oval, has the placekick appeared.

But Dennis Armfield, the designated placekicker for five years as a junior with the Perth-Bayswater Rugby Union team, would never say never, “and after all, the placekick is technically legal isn’t it”.

So how did the 65-game Carlton footballer compare the two kicks?

“The rugby ball is a bit rounder and fatter and is a bit spongier off the boot, whereas the AFL ball is a bit pointier and harder and has a different feel,” Dennis observed. “With a rugby ball you can almost kick it on the point and it won’t hurt your foot whereas with a football you can kick it on the point and you’re going to be feeling it for a while. But growing up, yeah, I definitely found the placekick easier to kick than the drop punt.”

Dennis believed that the placekick probably topped the drop punt for accuracy.

“With the placekick, your misses are generally very close misses and you very rarely see an out-on-the-full placekick, whereas with the drop punt you can sometimes spray it off the side of the boot,” he said.

“One reason why a placekick is always consistent is because all you really have to worry about is the placement of your planting footy and the follow-through, whereas with the drop punt you’ve got the ball drop, the placement of your planting foot and the follow-through.”

Armfield recalled that in executing the placekick he kept to a set routine which involved marking a spot where his foot needed to be planted then took “three steps back, four steps left” (and it’s worth noting that Ongarello took ten steps back to avoid being called for play-on).

“One added variable with the placekick in Australian Rules is that you’d also have to negotiate the man on the mark. With the drop punt, most forwards thesedays go through a set routine, but in saying that there remain variables like weather conditions, ball drop and the like.

“But if you went to an absolute beginner who’d never seen either ball and said ‘place kick this’ or ‘drop punt that’, the person would probably find it easier to placekick.”

So can Carlton supporters expect to see Dennis Armfield placekicking one through at Etihad Stadium on Monday night?

“Mate, I’d have to be a Brownlow Medal-winner playing in a team that’s up by 100 points to do that because if it misses there’d be one hell of a backlash,” he replied.

And if Mars offered $100,000 to the first League footballer to emulate “Onga’s deeds” of 57 years past?

“Well, I’d probably pop my head into ‘Ratts’ (coach Brett Ratten’s) office and say ‘Mate, we’ll go halves’ . . . you’ve got to cover your bases.”

Footnote: Earlier this year, the 131-game former Fitzroy full-forward Tony Ongarello, now in his 80th year, related the following story to this reporter of his place(kick) in history.

“Owen Abrahams and I were both Richmond supporters at Parade College, so we went to the football together a lot to watch Richmond play.

“One day we were sitting on the fence in the outer on the half forward flank and Jack Graham, the then South Melbourne captain, put two place kicks down right in front of us and kicked goals. I remember thinking ‘Gee, I’ve never seen that before’.

“The next day I took the ball under my arm, went down to the park and had a couple of kicks at goals with the placekick. I was 15 then, never believing that seven years later I’d do it for the next time without ever having done it at training.

“Anyway, we were playing Geelong at Fitzroy, and I’d kicked three goals with my wobbly punts early, then I just couldn’t kick straight at all and must have missed four or five or six even. Come the last quarter - the last five minutes of the last quarter - we were eight points down and I took a mark on the half-forward flank on the outer side. I went back and as I turned back I thought “Why don’t I try a placekick?” So with my back to the goals I dug a divot with my heel, turned around and set the ball up. Well the crowd went bananas and as I started to pace back they started to count with me and when they got to ten I stopped. I ran in and kicked it and the ball went straight towards the goal . . . luckily our big strong man Norm Johnstone put his arms out, leant back on the pack and the ball fell through. I thought ‘God, this is good, we’re only two points down’.

“About a minute later, the ball went out the other side in front of the members stand, I took another mark and did exactly the same thing. I thought ‘This is easy’. I went back, kicked it and it went right through the goals into Brunswick Street and we hit the front by two behinds . . . how could I ever forget that.”