Maybe it was an altered swing of his leg or the picking of some mental padlock. He finished the 2017 season with thirty-four goals, up from eighteen the previous year. Whilst I was on my drop-punt vision quest, the unexpected started happening in the real world. (Is that why the best footballers seem so painfully dull?) Or maybe it’s best suited for the intellectually subnormal, the best mind being no mind, the walking brainstem. It might be a task for the mental maestro, conducting your conscious and unconscious from an impossible third vantage. It feels like connecting a dodgy printer to a wi-fi network.

But it is stupefying how difficult it is to consciously control. It pales in comparison to the complexity, the hundreds of micro-movements of say, aeronautics. Kicking is actually simple, oppressively so. I had missed all ten shots caught on video, folding under the pressure of a single camera. I finished the afternoon with twelve goals and seven behinds. Approaching the fifty metre arc, I had eleven goals and needed nineteen. Maybe a simpler kicking action would help. I was confident in how strong my legs were getting. I panicked, going back to the two-handed drop. Minor corrections became over-corrections. Then the kicks started going out to forty metres. I heard the camera click into a tripod behind me. It was the limit of my distance with the new ball drop, but I had nailed similar kicks in practice. Next came a cluster of three kicks thirty metres out. If I nailed most of my close shots, I was in with a chance. Casboult had kicked just eighteen goals that year. I was hustling around the goal square, hoping to capitalise on momentum. Then the first six kicks became the first six goals. He would photograph and video my shots on goal for posterity.

I’d start with short kicks to build confidence, just like I’d practised. Longer kicks would employ the traditional drop. Every kick under thirty metres would get a two-handed ball drop. This is what happens when you support Carlton and slowly lose your mind.Ĭonditions were optimal on the day of the challenge. But which year? Coming from a background of school soccer, I’d want to compare myself to his worst year (Casboult had errant years, but 2016 had been especially dark). I could repeat his kicks and aim to kick a better score. But how would I do it? The key to any plan is setting specific, measurable goals. Shit, could I kick better than Casboult? Well, yes. Kicking for goal in Australian Rules seemed like free-kicks with no goalkeeper. Why is kicking so hard for footballers? I played soccer growing up. He should get a physiologist, a psychologist, an exorcist. He should drop the ball lower, crouch lower. Bloated ex-players fell over themselves on television to provide solutions. “Shit, I could kick that,” I say, a statement maybe not completely absurd. Although with Casboult, it is a state of permanent winter. It’s other key forwards, it’s Joey Daniher, it’s Darcy Moore. Casboult has a kicking problem, but the problem is not his alone. Then I watch Casboult wobble a nine-metre kick to score a behind and I am reminded that watching Carlton is not about excitement, but about unrelenting pain. Levi Casboult is the closest thing Carlton have to a Coleman-winning forward, which should be very exciting. Two metres tall, Casboult’s body isn’t a body but six writhing anacondas. A Levi Casboult contested mark is very exciting. The breakdown was his idea.I watch Levi Casboult take a mark in the goal square. You should have the 808s follow my voice.” If you hear the song, on certain parts, the 808s go crazy and follow his voice. Every second of the way he was right there like, “Oh, I like that hi-hat. He was giving his opinion and was very hands-on. Then was like, “Can we redo the drums?” Fwdslxsh was in London at the time, so I scrapped everything, kept the sample, built the drums and Lil Nas X was right there helping me along the way. I was like, “I’m most definitely down to work with him.” We got in the studio that Saturday after the “Old Town Road” remix with Billy Ray Cyrus dropped.īizness Boi: Fwdslxsh and I already had the beat, but it was more for an R&B artist or a pop artist. We pulled up to Columbia, and Wes -Lil Nas X’s A&R-asked if I wanted to work with this artist named Lil Nas X. How did you initially connect with Lil Nas X?īizness Boi: My manager, James Supreme, would set up a meeting and sessions for me while I was out in New York City.

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