outstanding fieldsman anywhere, Wills excelled in the slips and ran out batsmen with deadly accurate throwing. Wills was a "tear-away" footballer whose "pluck and skill", it was said, only George O'Mullane matched. The longest drop kick in Victoria, he was an elusive dodger, as at Rugby, and excelled in different positions, moving from a follower and goal-scorer in the ruck to full back. Of the early footballers, Wills was appraised as the greatest, most astute captain, and is credited with opening up the Australian game to new tactics and skills and a more free-flowing style of play. In July 1860—in what the press called a "coup de main", and what has since been regarded as a "tactical leap" that foreshadowed modern football—Wills breached the era's notional offside line by positioning his Richmond men down the field from defence to attack. By a series of short kick passes, they succeeded in scoring. That same month, captaining Melbourne to victory, he pioneered a rudimentary form of flooding; and, in another win for the club, exploited the low player turnout by instructing his men to dart with the ball in open spaces. In his season-by-season ranking of players, early football historian C. C. Mullen named Wills "Champion of the Colony" five times. Historian Bernard Whimpress called Wills an innovator who "would fit easily into today's game". Historian Geoffrey Blainey writes: "How many of the tricks and stratagems of the early years came from this clever tactician we will never know." Legacy Australia's first celebrity sportsman, Wills began to fade from public consciousness within his own lifetime. His dark reputation and suicide, and his links to convictism and frontier violence—sources of cultural cringe—have been posited as reasons for his descent into obscurity. Academic Barry Judd called him "a ghost inhabiting the margins of written history". Coinciding with a revival of interest in Australia's colonial past, Wills has risen "almost to a vogue", and is seen as a forerunner of today's self-destructive star athletes, some of those qualities that alienated his peers "being less shocking to a generation that likes its heroes flawed". The subject of scholarly, literary and artistic works, his story has been likened to Ned Kelly's as a powerful and quintessentially Australian narrative, and in 2006, The Bulletin named him as one of the 100 most influential Australians. After several attempts by different authors since the 1930s, a comprehensive biography was published