Les Foote - Football Career

Football Career

A local lad, and recruited from the North Melbourne Colts, Foote played his first match with the North Melbourne Football Club in 1941 at just 16 years of age.

He was able to kick equally well with both feet, and his ability to play close to the ground meant that he was not only a brilliant ball player, but was also had an outstanding ability to control the ball in packs. He was an excellent mark.

He was famous for his baulking and dodging skills (skills which he claimed to have honed "by walking through the crowded city footpaths, dodging and weaving through the oncoming people") and his courageous style of play.

He would torment his opponents by running straight towards them, holding the ball out to them — and, then, doing a blind turn around them, and continuing on his way.

His favourite ploy was, having taken a mark, to walk back and pretend to be preparing to do a drop kick, the man on the mark would jump into the air as Foote approached and, he would continue running towards the man on the mark, bounce the ball, and run straight past him, giving him the opportunity to deliver the ball much further up the ground.

Considered by many to be the most handsome footballer of his era, Foote had a propensity for ostentatiously displaying his extensive range of gracious football talents; and he was renowned for his habit of, regardless of where he had received the ball, running and bouncing the ball (often across the entire width of the Arden Street ground), so that he could run goalwards in full display along the boundary closest to the Ladies' Stand!