It was so much simpler when he was little Levi Casboult, a boy alone with a ball, a brick wall at the side of the house, imaginary goalposts running up the crevices. "I'd be Tony Lockett, kicking `em from 70."

His smile is warm, eyes twinkling with nostalgia. It's easy to imagine he longs for a time when he wasn't both blessed and cursed - perhaps the best mark in the game, and simultaneously a footballer whose goalkicking is so eccentric that those with an investment in its outcome are given to avert their gaze.

But fans who rip off their hats and hurl them to the ground, who howl at the moon, who are convinced they could down their tools or leave their desks and do better in work boots or street shoes, need to know the full story. Casboult's battle - his word for it - is always with him. It shapes him. He spends every day trying to get better. He is determined it won't beat him.

In his six years as a Carlton footballer, this fundamental skill has become a mind-bending maze of routines, mantras, mental tricks and mentors, a sapping process of building confidence that the next one will sail through, then rebuilding it all over again when it doesn't. Set aside how such uncertainty can torture coaches, teammates, fans. Imagine what it does to him.

"I think I've been pretty good at still wanting the ball until maybe this year," he says. "Maybe this year it's got to me a bit, maybe I've second-guessed myself and I haven't gone at a marking contest or haven't called for it as hard as I could."

He kicked four goals, two behinds in last Sunday's loss to Brisbane, striking the ball sweetly from 40 metres five minutes in, then flying in the face of the theory that early success is the foundation of confidence by missing from considerably closer before quarter-time. Casboult cuts himself no slack; a narrow miss on the run from 50 as the Blues made a fruitless late surge stays with him.

"You play a good game then you miss that one, [which would have] put us three points down ... We're professional athletes, we're going for perfection."

He was much closer to that unachievable state when he arrived at Carlton, rookie-drafted after a Dandenong Stingrays season in which he'd kicked 41.14. "A lot of them were probably from the goalsquare," he says, adding a little black humour to the tale.

He'd been a late starter. Those "Plugger" Lockett fantasies were played out in Fingal, inland from St Helens near Tasmania's east coast, and after a move to Hobart he played soccer. He was big but fast ("dunno where that went"), haring up and down the wings, swinging crosses in to the centre-forwards.

His parents ran a Dandenong cafe after they moved to Victoria, worked big hours. An uncle said he'd take him to footy training if he wanted to play, and would drive from Collingwood to Casboult's Endeavour Hills school, on to Beaconsfield, then drop him home in Berwick. "I probably would have kept playing soccer if it wasn't for him."

His first kicking tuition came at the Stingrays, former Cat Darren Flanigan encouraging him to practice with an oversized tennis ball against a wall. "Try and hold the ball as long as I could, just grip it and get it down to your foot."

He left school at 17, worked in the cafe, and on training nights would knock off early and spend an hour kicking at goal before his teammates arrived. "I was still never technically sound, but just the repetition paid off. I was pretty accurate back then."

The first significant change came in his first year as a Blue. Development coach Darren Harris injected more momentum into a run-up that was previously no more than a walk. John Barker worked with him before taking on backline duties, Brad Green took over for two seasons, and now he's the project of the game's 13th-greatest  goalkicker, Sav Rocca. "The boys are joking around, when do they get their own personal assistant coach? He's there for everyone, but obviously I'm getting the most out of him at the moment."

Essentially only the messenger has changed, not the message: work towards having a consistent, lower ball drop. He's back to a 10-step run-up, but has struck a compromise on momentum, feeling that too much speed lessens control. Now it's a walk with a few quicker steps before kicking.

At the top of his run-up, in that moment where breath is drawn, composure is sought and the target sighted, he reports generally feeling calm. "I don't put the pressure on myself, that, 'Oh, I've gotta kick it'. "

His focus is simplicity, to hear only two words: "Relax, drop. Relax, drop."

"It's just been repetition, repetition," he says of Rocca's mantra in their month-long partnership. "I've just gotta keep working at it so that when I'm fatigued my brain goes back to the good technique, not the bad one." He admits it's still coin-toss odds, as two shanks out on the full against St Kilda in New Zealand betrayed.

Casboult reckons he's pretty good at blocking out the cacophony. In Wellington he heard David Armitage offering particular advice as he walked in, doesn't know what exactly it was, just remembers the voice. A Claye Beams mouthful after last Sunday's first miss didn't bother him.

He's used to offers of advice, printable and otherwise. At a club function the night of the round-three Essendon game a well-refreshed stranger told him he used to be a good kick, then gave him his phone number, imploring Casboult to call if he wanted some outside help. "I felt bad saying no, so I took it. Everyone's got their two bob to put in."

Sometimes it must be hard not to wonder if the game exists only to tease him. Against the Bombers two years ago he goaled around his body from the intersection of the 50-metre and boundary lines, yet sometimes it seems like no opening could be big enough even from close range dead in front.

"When I have time to slow down and think about it, tends to be when things go wrong. Out at training, around the ground, when I just pull back and kick it I don't tend to shank many. But in front of goals, I tend to melt down a bit." His toil with Harris acknowledged this, working on the theory that if he was kicking well in general play he'd kick well at goal.

Last year Casboult started an electrical apprenticeship. He presents as laid-back but says looks can be deceptive; he worries about footy, knowing it's his livelihood. "If it's not working, I haven't really got much to fall back on at the moment, which is not necessarily a good thing."

He thinks the distraction helped his football, but has put the apprenticeship on hold this season and found himself "just pottering around" on his weekly day off. And thinking about, and working on, his goalkicking.

"I live across the road from a footy oval. I just take the dogs over, let them run around, and spend half an hour or so having a few shots."

Recently a stranger asked if he could join him, saying he hadn't had a kick in years. Casboult reckons he was in his 40s, and moved so well he told him, "You should pull the boots back on!" The stranger replied that he kicked it all right himself, asked did he play? Casboult hesitated, then said he played a bit of VFL.

"It was awkward. He obviously didn't know who I was, and I didn't want to say. It was nice, nice just to have a kick with someone."

He's never spoken to Travis Cloke, but reckons they'd have an interesting conversation. He has his own mountain to climb, and knows how crucial his progress will be to building on the sense that, after 40 games, he's no longer a VFL/AFL footballer, but a genuine AFL player in a team that needs him playing well.

If only he can master this one essential skill.

"I never think I'm not going to kick it. I still think every shot I'm gunna get - even though history suggests I won't. I've gotta go in with that attitude.

"I've heard with lots of different people that so much of it's in the head - that if you think you're gunna kick it then you will kick it. I don't necessarily think that's true, but it doesn't hurt to go in with a positive mindset."