Tiger gun Kane Lambert explains why he took year off footy after ‘detrimental’ draft year
Kane Lambert’s journey has been hard fought. The Tiger gun reveals why he didn’t play any form of footy after failing to get drafted in 2009. And it wasn’t because he was left on the board.
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Dual premiership Tiger Kane Lambert made the tough call to take a year off playing football after his taxing draft year due to the ‘detrimental’ impact it had on him.
Lambert missed out on being drafted in 2009 despite winning the Northern Knights’ best and fairest award, banging the door down in the VFL before becoming a Tiger in 2015.
But prior to his impressive stint in the VFL, the 28-year-old conceded he was playing football for the “wrong reasons”, with the year off serving to realign his values.
“I took the year off because I’d become driven by how other people define success … it didn’t reflect who I was and how I played the game,” Lambert told the Dyl and Friends podcast.
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“I was playing footy for the wrong reasons and I wasn’t enjoying it.
“I look back on that year and I think, we had a successful year and I got close to getting drafted but I didn’t enjoy my football.
“I probably become victim of the system in a sense. In the TAC Cup where it is all about individuals and getting drafted and getting onto an AFL list.
“Football is something you play because you love the game as an eight or nine year old at Auskick … I got so caught up in what other people thought that it was detrimental to my wellbeing and my vision and my values.”
Lambert was ‘undersized’ and had no expectations of getting drafted, but admitted he didn’t have a plan outside of footy.
“I never expected to get drafted but I never planned not to,” Lambert said.
“I ended up taking a year off football largely because I didn’t have a plan. I was never told I’d get drafted, I didn’t have a numerous amount of interviews.
“I was always undersized and it was probably at a time when they were looking for an athletic profile which I probably didn’t have.
Lambert slogged it out in a factory in his year away from footy, the kind of workmanlike effort we have come to expect from him on the field in recent years.
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He put on 10kg in the process to build an AFL-worthy frame, earning selection with VFL side Northern Bullants in 2011.
But there were certainly elements of that 2010 season that Lambert missed, using that as motivation.
“I treated it as a 12 month pre-season and I was only 60 kilos at that stage,” he said.
“To play senior footy I had to bigger, I had to get fitter, I had to get stronger. And mentally I had to get better as well,” he said.
“One thing I missed was the camaraderie. I’d go down and watch local training and watch the boys have a laugh, and the locker room jokes.”
“That’s the sort of stuff that I missed and that’s what motivated me to get back.”