"We'll drive past grounds and he'll look across and say, 'I took 10 marks and kicked five there one day," said Lamb, who lived with his mother and grandparents for a while when he was very young and his parents had just separated. "He always has stories for me from the old days. I've heard them so many times now, but they're good. He's always been the person I've been closest to, and he's always put himself out for me."

There's only so much he can pass on these days, though. When Ian Cooper started out in the 1960s, he was a 191-centimetre ruckman who weighed only 67 kilograms but could jump. After winning the best player award in his local league he called St Kilda one day, to ask if he could come down and train. He started out in the under-19 team, made his way into the reserves and then into the senior side. He was one of the Saints'  best players in the 1965 grand final, and probably the best when the club won its one and only flag the next year.

These days he likes to watch Tom play standing alone on one side of the ground, figuring he has more than enough people telling him what to do. "The one thing he used to tell me was to aim three quarters of the way up the post when I'm kicking for goal. But he's always saying that the game's changed so much from when he played, and it's even changed a lot from when my dad played," said Lamb, whose father Wayne was recruited to Melbourne as an under-19s zone player but notched just two senior games before being traded to Fitzroy. "Even they way they got into it was so different, both of them. Kids now, we just have to wait."

Lamb's wait has felt like a long one, and he has no idea where it is going to end on Thursday night. He is one of the most interesting players in this draft: a couple of centimetres taller than his grandfather, he's able to play as a marking forward, on the ball or off half-back. He can run all day, and kick a handful of goals in a hurry. The flipside? He's had an inconsistent year, and been told that he needs to improve his body language.

"He's going to win you games of footy and he might lose you a couple along the way as well," said Dandenong regional manager Mark Wheeler. "But he's hard on himself, he puts a lot of pressure on himself to be a good player. When he gets to a club he'll do everything that's asked of him, plus a little bit more."

That's where he has needed to be careful. Lamb is a player who pushes himself, sometimes too hard.

He wasn't happy with how he played for Vic Country during the national championships, especially given he missed out on last year's series because of a last-minute ankle injury, so as soon as the last game was over he stepped up his training program to make sure he would test well at the combine.

He swam laps, every morning. He went to the gym, every day after school, then on to footy training with the Stingrays. He would be in the gym on Friday nights even if he was playing the next morning, thinking, "I didn't get a kick in nationals so I'd better prove something. I just felt like I needed to do a lot more. It didn't turn out to be the best idea."

Instead of helping, it wore him down. A few weeks out from the finals Lamb was tired, all the time, and exhausted by game time. After struggling to run one Tuesday night at training he told his coach what he had been doing and started to rest up, recover and concentrate on the games he still had left to play. He felt much better about how he played in the Stingrays' two finals, and was surprised by how well he ran at the combine: he ran a level 15.5 beep test and his 9.45 time trial was even more impressive.

All of it was a lesson: there can be too much of a good thing. "I thought it would help me and it didn't, but I was only doing it to get better and hopefully that's something that can help me when I get to a club," Lamb said. "That's what I'm looking forward to, being somewhere where they show you everything to do and show you how to improve, without overdoing it."

He knows how difficult the world he is stepping in to will be. Ian Cooper had just been picked in the 1967 Victorian squad when he was laid low with rheumatic fever, and he was never the same. Wayne Lamb played 16 games in his first year at Fitzroy, but was cut after a three-game second season. "They've both told me how tough it is and how you can't take anything for granted," Lamb said. "You have to work hard and be as professional as you can be, do everything as well as you can. That's what I want to do."