By Russell Bennett
PAKENHAM teenager Mykelti Lefau takes everything in his stride – it’s plain to see with his happy-go-lucky attitude and calm demeanour.
Perhaps it’s for that reason that he hasn’t made a huge deal about just what he accomplished on 27 August for the St Kilda City Under 19s against Carrum Patterson Lakes in their Southern Football League clash at Roy Dore Reserve.
The Saints powered to a huge win – 28.10(178) to 2.2(14), but that’s just the start of the story because Mykelti, who was born and raised in Auckland and is in just his fourth year of footy, kicked 25 of those 28 goals.
There were only five goals for the entire match that didn’t come from Mykelti’s boot, but if that feat wasn’t remarkable enough – he normally plays in the midfield.
He’s got a hulking 6’4” frame that belies his speed and agility and his pure brute strength allows him to split packs and shrug off tackles with ease.
Mykelti, a former Pakenham junior under Warren ‘Cowboy’ Cawcutt, is in his first year with the Saints alongside a group of his mates – Josiah Laakulu, Leon Mateariki, Jeremy Dang, Fabricko and Febrick Addi, and Nathan Dawson – all local boys. Nathan Johns, another local, is their coach.
Mykelti and his mates car pool to games right across the expansive Southern competition, but he then has to find his way to his rugby league games each Saturday afternoon. Yes, he plays Under 19 footy and Under 18 rugby league on the same day.
Mykelti’s performance against Carrum Patterson Lakes is already the stuff of legend – he last week sat comfortably on top of the weekly goal kicking list on the SportsTG community of local footy websites.
But he’ll leave it up to others to make a fuss about it. All he wants to do is keep improving in his footy enough to make scouts stand up and take notice.
It’s safe to say they already have.
Though not usually a stay-at-home forward, Mykelti was stationed inside the forward 50 against Carrum because his coach thought he had a shot at winning the league goal kicking award. How right he was.
His 25-goal haul – plus his three on the weekend against Oakleigh District – takes his season tally to 72 through just 15 games. That includes hauls of 11 goals in late May, and two others of eight. Again, he’s not usually a full-forward.
“The coach told me I needed 14 goals (to win the league goal kicking) – he worked it all out,” the 18-year-old SEDA student said of his game against Carrum.
“I needed 14 to get on top but then I had 10 and it wasn’t even half-time yet.
“In the first quarter I had five and I thought I was on track, and then in the second quarter I destroyed this guy and they had to switch him.
“The other team was cracking up – they were laughing.
“I don’t even think about the game but everyone else reminds me. I don’t make a big deal about it. I got fed pretty well.
“Half of them were from really good delivery but the other half were just really weird. There was one where the ball went to ground and it was around the point post and obviously they were trying to rush it. There were two of them there – one was trying to shepherd me and when the other kid went to rush it behind I slipped around him and grabbed him. He was holding the ball and I picked him and the ball up together and he let it go and I just kicked it. Everyone was laughing – even their own team mates. I felt bad for them.
“I just ripped the ball out of this guy’s hands. That was a really weird goal, that one, but what I hated was that I had to go and get it myself.
“I had to do it 25 times! It was like I was doing fitness tests.”
And the scariest thing – Mykelti is still rapidly improving, being so new to the game. Heaven help anyone trying to stop him in the years to come!
