AFL Kicking: Drop Punt, Torpedo and Banana Explained

Australian football is decided by kicking, and almost all of that kicking is one kick. The drop punt accounts for the overwhelming majority of the roughly 208 kicks both teams combine for in an average AFL match, because it is the only kick that reliably goes where it is aimed. The other AFL kicking techniques survive as specialists: the torpedo for distance, the banana and the snap for curving the ball around an angle, and a handful of oddities that appear once a season and get replayed for a fortnight.

That is the short answer. The drop punt is the default because backspin stabilises the ball in flight; the torpedo trades that stability for distance; the banana and the snap trade it for curve. Every other choice a player makes with the ball in hand is downstream of those trade-offs, and the reason the modern game looks the way it does is that coaches decided somewhere in the 1980s that keeping the ball was worth more than gaining ground with it.

This page covers how each kick is struck, when a player would choose it, what the numbers say about kicking in the AFL, and what the 2026 law changes did to kicking on the wing and from the goalsquare. It sits with two companion pages on the same skills cluster: the handball, which is what a player does when kicking is not an option, and tackling, which is what the opposition is doing to stop both.

The four kicks that decide an AFL match

Almost everything you will see in a match is one of four kicks. The drop punt is the workhorse and covers field kicking, set shots and most kick-ins. The torpedo punt is the long-range option, now rare. The banana or checkside punt curves the ball back towards goal from a pocket. The snap curves it the other way, off the inside of the foot.

Every other kick in the game is either a variation on one of those four or a relic. The drop kick, which was standard until the 1970s, has effectively gone. The place kick, once used for shots at goal, disappeared with the rule changes that removed the kicker's ability to set the ball on the ground. Grubbers, soccer kicks off the deck and the occasional flat punt turn up as emergency measures rather than techniques anyone teaches.

Understanding the four kicks is the fastest way to make sense of a match. When a defender takes possession at half-back and pauses, he is choosing between a drop punt to a target and a longer kick down the line. When a forward wins the ball five metres from the boundary at the top of the goalsquare, he is choosing between a banana and a snap. The decision is usually made before the ball is in his hands.

What the Sherrin does that a round ball cannot

The ball explains the technique. An Australian football is a prolate spheroid — a stretched oval with a seam running around its long axis — and it behaves in the air according to how it is spinning when it leaves the boot. The AFL uses a Sherrin, red for day matches and yellow under lights, and its shape is the reason kicking Australian football is harder than kicking a round ball.

A ball struck cleanly on its point spins backwards end over end and holds a straight, predictable arc. A ball struck slightly across its axis spirals. A ball struck badly does neither and wobbles, losing distance and drifting off line. There is no version of a kick where the ball simply travels straight because you aimed it straight.

That is why coaches at every level in Australia obsess over the ball drop rather than the leg swing. A player with a mediocre leg and a perfect release will kick better than a powerful athlete who tosses the ball at his boot. It also explains why the same player kicks worse in the rain: a wet, heavier Sherrin slides in the hands and the release stops being repeatable.

The drop punt, and why it is the default AFL kicking technique

The drop punt is the most common kick in the game because it is the most accurate. The ball is held upright with a hand on either side, the point angled slightly towards the ground and the laces facing the target, and it is guided down onto the top of the boot so that the foot strikes the point. The ball rotates backwards end over end and travels on a flight a teammate can read.

The grip matters more than most junior players are told. Hands sit evenly either side of the ball, thumbs pointing naturally up the main seam without gripping it, roughly three-quarters of the way up the laces. Too tight a grip drags the ball off line on release. Too loose and the ball rolls out of the hands before contact.

The run-up is short and straight: three or four steps for a field kick, a few more for a long one. The plant foot lands beside the ball's intended contact point and the kicking leg drives through the ball rather than at it. The follow-through finishes high and straight down the line of the target, because the leg finishing across the body is the single most common cause of a hooked kick.

Everything an elite player does after that is refinement. The kick itself is a schoolyard skill. What separates the AFL from the local league is the ability to reproduce it while moving at pace, on a wet ball, with a tackler arriving, which is why tackling pressure is measured as closely as kicking is.

Why the release, not the leg, decides where the ball goes

Coaches have a saying that a kick is a hand skill. It is not quite true, but it is closer to the truth than most people assume. The ball has to arrive at the boot in the same position, at the same angle, at the same height, every time. If it does, the foot only has to swing straight.

The two classic faults are both releases. The first is dropping the ball too early, from too high, so that it has time to rotate or drift before contact. The second is tossing it rather than guiding it, which puts spin on the ball before the foot touches it and turns the kick into a lottery. Neither is fixed by kicking harder.

Filming the ball drop from side-on is the cheapest coaching intervention available to any club in Australia, and it is what most senior clubs do with a player in a slump. The player almost always believes the problem is in his leg. It almost never is.

1. 1Set the gripHold the ball upright with a hand either side, thumbs up the main seam, point angled slightly down towards the boot.
2. 2Line up the targetTake three or four steps in a straight line at the target rather than curving in, so the hips finish square.
3. 3Guide the ball downRelease the ball late and low, guiding rather than dropping it, so it arrives point-first at a repeatable height.
4. 4Strike the pointThe boot meets the point of the ball and drives through it, producing end-over-end backspin that stabilises the flight.
5. 5Follow through the lineThe leg finishes high and straight down the line of the kick, not across the body, which is what hooks a kick off target.

A generic technical sequence assembled from published coaching material. Individual players vary the number of steps and the grip, and the sequence matters more than any single detail.

Where the drop punt came from

The drop punt is not old by the standards of the game. Australian football was played for most of its first century with the drop kick, in which the ball is dropped to the ground and struck immediately after the bounce, and with the place kick and the older punt styles for shots at goal.

Richmond's Jack Dyer is generally credited with making the drop punt a standard kick. He took the idea from Collingwood's Collier brothers, who used a version of it to lob the ball over opponents, and set out the technique in his 1965 book. Other players had used similar kicks earlier, so the honest history is that the drop punt was popularised rather than invented.

What made it spread was television and coaching. Once the kick could be demonstrated and copied, its advantage was obvious: it worked in the wet, it worked off a short run, and it did not depend on a clean bounce the way a drop kick did. By the 1980s the drop kick was gone from senior football and the drop punt was the game's default.

The torpedo punt: distance at the cost of control

The torpedo, also called the screw punt or the barrel, is struck differently. The ball is held at an angle across the body with one hand slightly higher than the other, and it is dropped onto the boot with a turn so the foot strikes across the ball rather than square on its point. The ball spirals along its long axis, cuts through the air more cleanly than an end-over-end ball, and travels further.

Struck perfectly, a torpedo can travel over 80 metres. That is the problem. The window for a clean strike is small, and a torpedo that is struck fractionally off spirals away from the target, often at right angles to where the kicker was aiming. A mis-hit drop punt still lands roughly where it was pointed. A mis-hit torpedo can end up in the opposite pocket.

The kick declined from the 1980s onwards, as coaching shifted from gaining territory to retaining possession. If the measure of a kick is whether it reaches a teammate, a technique with a wide error distribution is a bad technique regardless of how far it goes when it works. The change is the clearest example in Australian football of tactics rewriting technique.

When a torpedo is still worth kicking

It has not disappeared entirely, and there are three situations where it remains the right choice.

The first is the kick-in, where there is no defender within 40 metres, the kicker has time to strike it cleanly, and the aim is to move the ball past the opposition's forward press rather than to hit a specific target. The second is a long set shot from outside 50 metres, where drop punt conversion is poor anyway and the alternative is a kick that drops short into a defender's hands. The third is the end of a quarter, when the downside of a bad kick is small.

You will also see a torpedo when a team is behind late and needs metres more than it needs possession. That is a rational response to the scoreboard rather than a technical preference. Watch a close final in Australia and count the torpedoes in the last three minutes.

The banana, or checkside punt

The banana kick, properly called the checkside punt, is struck off the outside of the boot. The ball is held with its ends pointing roughly to two o'clock and eight o'clock for a right-footed kick, and the foot swings across and outside the ball, imparting a sidespin that curves the ball back in the opposite direction to the leg swing.

For a right-footer, that means the ball starts left of the goal and bends right. It is the kick a forward uses from the left forward pocket, where the goal face is closed off and a straight kick would either miss on the near side or have to be threaded through a crowd.

It is a high-skill kick with a genuine failure mode. Struck too thin, the ball spins hard and drops short. Struck too full, it does not curve at all and sails across the face for a behind or out on the full. Because of that, it is a goalkicking kick rather than a field kicking kick, and you almost never see one attempted as a pass to a teammate.

The snap, and how it differs from the banana

The snap is the banana's mirror image. It is struck off the inside of the foot, across the body, with the ball dropped closer to perpendicular and the contact coming off the instep. For a right-footer the ball curves left rather than right.

That makes it the kick for the right forward pocket, where the banana would bend the wrong way. It is also the kick a player reaches for when he is spinning out of a tackle and has no time to square up, because it can be struck off a shorter backswing than a banana and does not require the body to be balanced.

In practice, the words are used loosely. Commentators in Australia call almost any curving kick a snap and almost any curving goal a banana. The technical distinction is simply which side of the foot the ball comes off, and once you know to watch the boot rather than the ball, it is easy to see.

The four kicks side by side

Kick	How it is struck	Ball in flight	Where you see it
Drop punt	Point-down onto the top of the boot	Backwards end over end, straight and stable	Everywhere: field kicks, set shots, kick-ins
Torpedo punt	Across the ball with a turn, one hand higher	Spiral along the long axis, longer but less predictable	Kick-ins, long set shots, end of quarters
Banana or checkside	Off the outside of the boot	Curves opposite to the swing of the leg	Forward pockets on the opposite side to the kicking foot
Snap	Off the inside of the foot, across the body	Curves towards the non-kicking side	Forward pockets on the same side, and out of tackles

The kicks that barely survive

A handful of older or improvised kicks still appear. The drop kick, in which the ball is struck immediately after it bounces, is effectively extinct in senior football but occasionally turns up in schoolyards and in one deliberate throwback per decade. The place kick, where the ball is set on the ground, is gone from the AFL entirely.

The grubber is a low kick that bounces or rolls, used near goal when the angle is hopeless and a ball skidding through a pack is more likely to score than a high one that can be punched. Because a Sherrin bounces unpredictably, it is a genuinely low-percentage kick, and coaches tolerate it rather than teach it.

The soccer kick off the ground is not a kicking technique so much as a disposal of last resort in congestion. It is legal, it counts as a kick for statistical purposes, and it is one of the few skills where a player's junior soccer background genuinely shows.

The chip, the switch and the kick that is really a pass

Not every kick is trying to gain ground. A large share of modern AFL kicks are short passes of 20 to 30 metres to a leading teammate, and those are drop punts struck with a shortened run-up and deliberately less power.

The switch is the kick that moves the ball from one wing to the other across the middle of the ground, usually from half-back. It opens the field by making the opposition's defensive structure slide sideways, and it is the highest-risk kick in the game because a turnover in the corridor gives the opposition a direct line at goal. Teams that switch well are usually teams with defenders who can kick.

The chip is the short sideways or backwards kick that maintains possession while the team resets. It is the most criticised kick in Australian football, endlessly described as boring, and it is also one of the most effective, which is why the AFL has spent two decades introducing rules designed to discourage it. You can read how those structures fit together in the guide to AFL game styles and tactics.

Kicking efficiency and what the number actually measures

Kicking efficiency is the percentage of a player's kicks that reach a teammate. It appears in every broadcast and it is easy to misread. A defender who chips 20-metre passes to an unmarked teammate will post a high figure. A midfielder who kicks long inside 50 to a contest will post a low one, even if every kick was the right decision.

Champion Data's kick rating attempts to fix this by weighting each kick for difficulty — the distance, the pressure, whether the target was contested — and judging whether it hit its mark. Its published lists of the best and worst kicks in a season look quite different from a raw efficiency ladder, which tells you how much the raw number is measuring role rather than skill.

The practical reading for a viewer is simple. Compare like with like. A key defender's efficiency should be compared against other key defenders, and an inside midfielder's against other inside midfielders. Comparing a half-back flanker with a forward tells you nothing about either.

How far does an AFL kick travel

Less than most people assume. A fit senior player kicks a drop punt roughly 45 to 55 metres on the full, and the longest kickers in the competition push past 60. A clean torpedo can add 10 to 15 metres on top of that.

The Fox Footy Longest Kick competition, which ran as a skills event, has a record of 72.3 metres set by Bryce Gibbs in 2016. Historical claims run much further: Albert Thurgood's place kick at East Melbourne on 22 June 1899 was measured at about 98.5 metres, with some wind assistance, and is still cited as the longest kick recorded in the game. The balls, the rules and the measuring methods were all different, so it is a record best treated as a piece of history rather than a benchmark.

The practical figure that matters to a coach is not the maximum. It is how far a player can kick accurately under fatigue in the last quarter, which for most players is 10 metres shorter than their best.

Kicking on the non-preferred foot

Almost every AFL player can kick 20 metres on his other foot. Very few can kick 45 metres accurately on it. The gap explains a great deal about how defenders set up: forcing a player onto his weaker side is a defensive tactic in its own right, and defenders are coached to shepherd opponents that way in the same manner a bowler works a batter across their off stump.

Coaches in Australia generally build one reliable foot before adding the second, on the reasoning that a player who can kick well with one foot is more useful than one who kicks moderately with both. Non-preferred work is then added in low-pressure repetition, short kicks first, so that a player at least has a legal disposal on that side instead of turning back into a tackle.

The players who genuinely kick well on both sides are unusual enough that it becomes part of how they are described. It is also, increasingly, part of how they are recruited, which the AFL draft guide covers in more detail.

The 2026 laws that changed how players kick

Two of the seven changes introduced for the 2026 season directly affect kicking, and both push in the same direction: quicker, safer, more accurate.

The first is the last disposal law. A free kick is now awarded when the ball crosses the boundary line from a disposal between the arcs, regardless of whether the player intended to put it out. This aligns the men's competition with the AFLW rule and removes the umpire's judgement about intent from most boundary decisions. A normal throw-in still applies where a player was blocked or did not get to the ball before it crossed. In practice it means a rushed kick down the line that misses its target is no longer a neutral outcome — it hands the opposition possession. The related judgement calls are covered in the guide to deliberate out of bounds.

The second is the kick-in clock, reduced from about 12 seconds to 8 seconds so it matches the time allowed for a mark or a free kick anywhere else on the ground. Less time means fewer elaborate kick-in set-ups and more players simply playing on.

Alongside those, the requirement for a player from each team to start in the goalsquare after a goal has been removed, the centre bounce has been replaced by the umpire throwing the ball up, and clubs now name 23 players with five on the interchange bench after the medical substitute was scrapped. None of those is a kicking law, but together they mean more ball-ups, fewer stoppages in dead time and slightly more running for the same 23 players — all of which show up in how tired legs kick in the last quarter.

Kicking in from a behind, on an eight-second clock

The kick-in is the one moment in a match where a player has the ball, space, and a free choice of kick. It is also now the moment with the tightest clock relative to the decision required.

The options are a short kick to a defender who has broken free, a long kick down a boundary line, a torpedo over the top of the opposition press, or playing on and running out of the square. Teams rehearse these as set plays with numbered options, and the eight-second limit means the read has to be made before the ball is collected rather than after.

Because a behind is worth one point and a turnover from a kick-in can be worth six against you, the kick-in is one of the most heavily analysed sequences in the game. It is also where you are most likely to see a torpedo in 2026.

Kicking to a contest versus kicking to space

The choice that decides most inside-50 entries is not which kick but where to put it. A kick to a one-on-one contest gives a tall forward a chance to mark and gives the defence a chance to spoil. A kick to space in front of a leading forward removes the contest but requires the timing of the lead and the kick to match.

Modern defences are built to outnumber the contest, which is why teams that enter inside 50 by kicking long to a pack score less efficiently than teams that hit a target. It is also why the mark remains the most valuable single event in the game: it stops the clock, kills the defensive press, and converts a contest into a set shot.

The counterpoint is that kicking to space demands accuracy under pressure, and pressure is exactly what a defensive structure is designed to apply. That circular relationship — better kicking beats pressure, more pressure beats kicking — is most of what tactical evolution in Australian football consists of.

Wind, rain and the Australian season

The AFL season runs through the Australian autumn and winter, from March to September, which means most football is played in cool and often wet conditions in Melbourne, Adelaide and Geelong, and in warmer, drier weather in Brisbane and Perth.

Rain changes kicking twice over. The ball is heavier and travels shorter, and it is slippery, so the ball drop becomes unreliable. Players respond by shortening the approach, releasing the ball lower, kicking flatter and abandoning anything that needs a clean sidefoot contact. Bananas and snaps largely disappear in heavy rain.

Wind is the bigger factor at open grounds. A cross-breeze at Adelaide Oval or a swirling wind at the MCG moves a well struck drop punt several metres off line over 50 metres, and teams routinely choose which end to kick to at the start of a quarter on that basis. The venue guides for the MCG and Adelaide Oval cover the ground shapes behind those effects.

Grounds: Marvel, the MCG and what the roof does

Ground dimensions change kicking more than most viewers realise. The MCG is long and wide, which rewards players who can kick 50 metres and creates space for switching. Marvel Stadium is narrower and shorter, which compresses play towards the boundary, shortens the average kick, and produces more shots from tight angles where the banana and the snap earn their place.

A closed roof removes wind and rain entirely, and the difference in kicking accuracy between a wet MCG and a closed Marvel Stadium on the same weekend can be stark. It is the closest Australian football comes to a controlled environment.

Optus Stadium in Perth and the Gabba in Brisbane sit between the two: outdoors, but in a warmer and drier winter than Victoria's, which is one of several reasons interstate travel is treated as a genuine competitive factor rather than an excuse.

• Kicks
• Handballs

1965218.239.8

1980211.295.5

1990203.6108.2

2000201.1111.1

2010201168.6

2020174.7121

2025208.2146.6

AFL Tables per-match averages covering both teams combined. The 2020 figures reflect shortened quarters that season rather than a change in playing style.

Show the numbers

Kicks and handballs per match by season

Item	Kicks	Handballs
1965	218.2	39.8
1980	211.2	95.5
1990	203.6	108.2
2000	201.1	111.1
2010	201	168.6
2020	174.7	121
2025	208.2	146.6

How kicking is taught in Australia

The pathway starts with Auskick, where children learn a shortened drop punt with a modified ball and no pressure, and moves through junior club football, school competitions and state programs. The technical model is consistent nationally: grip, straight approach, guided ball drop, contact on the point, follow through the line.

What changes as players move up is not the technique but the conditions under which it must survive. Junior kicking is taught standing still. Senior kicking is tested at speed, off either foot, with a tackler arriving, on a wet ball, in the last five minutes. Development programs progressively strip away the comfort, which is why the AFL academy system puts as much emphasis on decision-making as on skill execution.

Clubs measure kicking constantly. Target-hitting drills under fatigue, kicking after a shuttle run, and kicking with a defender closing are standard. The number that matters to a recruiter is not how well a player kicks at training on Tuesday but how well he kicks in the fourth quarter in August.

Common faults and the fixes

Most bad kicking in Australia comes down to four faults, and all four are visible from the side of the ground.

A hooked kick that curves away from the target usually means the leg is finishing across the body rather than down the line, often because the run-up curved in. The fix is the approach, not the leg. A wobbling ball that loses distance means the ball was not struck on its point, which almost always traces back to the release. A kick that consistently falls short under pressure means the player is rushing the drop rather than the swing. And a kick that goes straight but to nobody is a decision problem, not a technique problem.

• 44Most kicks in a match
• 634Most kicks in a season
• 72Longest kick competition record in metres
• 208Kicks per match in 2025

Records from AFL Tables and from the Fox Footy Longest Kick skills competition. The distance figure is a competition record, not a match measurement, and match kicks are not officially measured.

Left-footers and why lists are built around them

Roughly one player in five kicks left-footed, and clubs actively count them. The reason is structural. A left-footer running down the left boundary can kick inboard naturally, while a right-footer in the same position has to turn back or kick across his body. Defensive set-ups exploit this by forcing ball carriers to their weaker side, so a team stacked entirely with right-footers is easier to shepherd.

Balance also matters for kick-ins and for the forward line, where a left-footer in the right pocket can bend a banana back towards goal that a right-footer would have to snap. Watch which pocket a club's left-footed small forwards drift to and you will see the pattern within a quarter.

It is a small effect that compounds. List managers talk about it during the trade period in the same breath as height and speed.

What to watch, and where to go next

Next time you watch a match, ignore the ball for a quarter and watch the boot at the moment of contact. You will see how many kicks are drop punts, how rarely anyone attempts a torpedo now that a poor kick between the arcs concedes a free kick, and how quickly players decide between a banana and a snap in the pocket.

Then watch the release rather than the swing. The players who kick well all do the same thing with their hands, and the players having a bad night are almost always dropping the ball badly rather than kicking it badly.

For the rest of the game around the kick, the beginner's guide to AFL rules covers the basic framework, scoring explains what a kick is worth, and the Australia hub collects the rest of the sport guides across the codes, alongside the broader sports section.