One-game Wonders (part two): Ex-Crows player Clayton Lamb recalls how breaking a curfew cost him his AFL career
Every AFL player has a story about their debut – even those who never played again. Part two of our One-game Wonders series is an ex-Crow who still rues a late night with teammates in Perth.
- One-game wonders: Part 1 - St Kilda’s Leigh Capsalis
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Ask Clayton Lamb about playing just one game for the Crows and he punningly calls himself a “sacrificial lamb”.
The left-footed half-forward gathered 12 disposals and kicked one goal on debut for Adelaide in a 65-point away loss to West Coast in round five, 1991 – and never played another AFL match.
Now aged 55, co-running a plumbing business and working as a fireman, Lamb still rues breaking a post-game team curfew that he says cost him a chance to leave the one-game club.
He remembers inaugural Crows coach Graham Cornes telling the players after the loss they needed to be back at their Perth hotel by 11pm – then catching Lamb, skipper Chris McDermott and vice-captain Tony McGuinness returning together not long before 1am.
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At a team meeting the next day, the trio owned up to staying out too late and Cornes told Lamb soon after he would never play for the club again.
“McGuinness held us out (at the casino) and we were trying to rally him back to the hotel before the curfew,” Lamb recalls.
“There was actually four of us – Allan Bartlett was with us but we didn’t put him in it, being good teammates.
“We got back late because we couldn’t get a cab and then we got found out.
“We were in the lift and Cornesy had a room right next to the lift, and he could hear noise.
“He’s pushed the (lift) button and we thought it was our room (on Cornes’s floor) so we piled out, and he’s obviously looked out the door … and nabbed the three of us.
“You can’t sack the captain and the vice-captain, can you? That’s why I like to refer to myself as a sacrificial lamb.”
Lamb was dropped the following week, coughed up his $1200 match payment and returned to the SANFL with Glenelg.
He came down with glandular fever while training hard at the end of the Crows’ inaugural season in 1991 and was sidelined for three months.
It was during that time that Cornes visited Lamb with more bad news – the club would have to delist him.
“I knew it was coming because I couldn’t train and could hardly work in that January, February, March period,” Lamb says.
Lamb lined up at Glenelg for two more seasons before retiring at the end of 1993 with 262 SANFL games, four state matches and that one AFL clash to his name.
Later, he coached the Tigers’ reserves and amateur league club St Peter’s Old Collegians, was a SANFL state selector and was a coach with Port Adelaide under Mark Williams.
Lamb still feels “a little bit robbed” he never got the chance to play again at the elite level, particularly at Football Park, but takes it all with good humour.
“I get ribbed about it (one game) all the time,” says Lamb, who was drafted by Hawthorn in 1986 but decided to stay in SA.
“I don’t take it too serious and feel lucky to have played one, and was grateful to the Adelaide Football Club to play AFL because that was what you strived for when you were a SANFL player.
“I have a lot of players say ‘if it wasn’t for that (late) night, you’d have been all right’.
“I did the wrong thing and I didn’t get another chance.
“If I could turn back the clock, I’d have been in bed at 10 o’clock.”
Lamb is one of four Crows to feature in just one game, along with John Hinge (2007), Tim McIntyre (2012) and current player Ben Davis.
Twenty-eight years on, Lamb does not hold any animosity towards Cornes, who he credits for telling him in person about his delisting.
It is all water under the sink – Lamb does Cornes’s plumbing.
“I’ve made sure I got that $1200 (match payment) off him from his plumbing,” Lamb says with a laugh.
There is another constant reminder in Lamb’s life about that one game against West Coast – his son-in-law.
Present-day Eagles midfielder Jack Redden is married to Lamb’s daughter, Aymee.
“It’s funny how the wheel turns,” Lamb says.
“But he’s too polite to rib me about it.”
Lamb watches Redden’s West Coast matches but his allegiance remains with the Crows and he goes to their games whenever he can.
No one ever recognises Lamb as an ex-Crows player and he reckons he is now simply the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question – who was Adelaide’s number six before star full-forward Tony Modra?
“I was the first number six,” Lamb says.
“And that’s my reasoning – I had to let Tony Modra play because he was a champion, so I basically bowed out so he could have number six and make it famous.”