Who says you can't get better while sitting on the couch?

Since all my favourite shows have finished their run in the States, I have been left with bugger all to download and watch on my laptop in bed before dozing off. So instead I've been going through the early seasons of Scrubs on DVD. Great show. But I digress.

Instead of being tucked up in bed upstairs, I'm on the couch watching it on the telly downstairs. I'm quite fidgety, and can't sit still without doing something with my hands as well (hello ladies). More often than not, I have a disc in my hands. My activities with the disc include, but are not limited to...

• Trying unsuccessfully to spin the disc on my fingertips.
• Throwing up push passes.
• Catching said push passes with my left hand.
• Faking scoobers and backhands (forehands too difficult to do sitting down).
  
• Switching between forehand and backhand grips with a flick of the wrist.

First three...idle waste of time, really. But the last two came in quite handy over the weekend at Halibut.

I've always seen faking as being a vital part of handling, especially against a zone. So many times I've seen players put out terrible fakes - just doing it for the sake of doing it. And I have seen some people's fakes bought by their marker, the fence, the deep deep, the TD, half the crowd and birds in nearby trees. After watching some of those people at work and paying attention to what they do to make their fakes convincing, I realised how simple it was.

Do everything you do in a normal throw, except for letting go of the disc.

So I started doing that in games. And it worked. One of my favourite break throws is to suddenly crouch down low and fire out an inside-out forehand right from my marker's hips. Which I remember from my goalkeeping days as being a very difficult spot to defend. Then when I started throwing in a simple hammer fake, it became easier to get that throw off.

So back to the couch.

I have found that a fake becomes even better when you make the disc move at the end of your throwing motion, to make your marker think for that split second you have actually let go of the disc. So when I fake a scoober or hammer, I actually flick the disc down onto my wrist, and the marker bought it nearly every time.

And when I faked a backhand, I flicked the disc around, straight into a forehand grip, which allow me to step across to the forehand side and get the throw off about half a second earlier. This can make a huge difference in terms of metres gained, since you're hitting your receiver half a second earlier (3-5 metres). Same of the other way - fake a forehand, flick into a backhand grip and step across into the backhand huck, having that extra split second to get the throw off unmarked.

Then I learned something else to add.

Being tall, I have the advantage of simply being able to reach over my marker's shoulder without too much strain. So a few times I put in a high fake over my marker's shoulder behind their line of sight while flicking the wrist. This worked better than I thought, because apparently it sounded like I had let go of the disc (the sound of course being right in their ear) and the marker would turn around and start running away. Amazing.

At Halibut, I added another aspect.

This wasn't some amazing epiphany - I got this from watching/talking to O-Shep. If I threw in the aforementioned over-the-shoulder-flicking-the-wrist fake while I had two feet planted, then as soon as I've flicked the wrist, I quickly pivot out around the marker, giving the illusion I have started running. Which in turn causes the marker to do the old "oh shit I better go chase him", leaving you to throw whatever pass you want.

Sold two suckers up the river with that one.