Jack Viney had been waiting, waiting, waiting. Not all that patiently, either. By the time he got to play his first game for Melbourne he had been around the club for more than two years as a father-son player in waiting. He knew the players, he'd worked with the coaches and he knew exactly what he wanted to do: get drafted, get started and help make the club he loved better, as soon as he could. "When I came in I was pretty gung-ho. I wanted to do this and I wanted to do that," he said. "I was in a big rush to get where I wanted to go and where I wanted the team to go. Then the games started and that's when I thought, I've got so much to learn."
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Viney loves football, adores the Demons and has only ever known one way: he's the kid who some parents wanted moved up and out of certain junior sides because he tackled too hard and who had a strong mind and some stronger ideas once he made it onto the Melbourne list. If another, older player pushed in front of him in a queue to see the physio he told them to go back to the end of the line. When the Demons lost to Port Adelaide in his first game it felt as though the players had done none of the things they had been working on together all the way through pre-season, so when not many of them wanted to talk about it in the meeting room after the game, he did.
To watch other games in his first year was hard, because he hated seeing other players winning and looking so happy when his team was losing so many games. "It made me a bit jealous," he said. "It was tough. I didn't like it."
Viney still speaks up, at the right times and in what he hopes is the right ways. "I'm sure there were so many players back then thinking 'who is this kid? He's 18 and he's talking all the time'," he said.
"It's a fine line and in some ways I've had to pull that back a bit. It's been a big learning thing for me, balancing that, and I'm still learning a fair bit about how to be honest but express it in the best ways.
"But sometimes you have to say things that piss people off, I guess. Not all the time, but sometimes. I think we have a mindset at the club now where if someone speaks up or feels like they need to point something out, it's because they want to help and want you to get better."
His thinking has expanded in other ways, too. Viney is still combative, still aggressive.That's never going to change and he has loved the challenge of going one-on-one against Gary Ablett, Joel Selwood, Tom Rockliff, Jack Steven and others this year knowing only he or them will get to the ball first. In some ways, the jobs have felt simple when reduced to that head-to-head battle. But he has also had to start making quicker and better decisions, with much more riding on them than before.
It's all about positioning, and reading the ball, getting stronger and concentrating. Playing alongside Nathan Jones has helped him learn more about what to do in all those brief but crucial moments, and trying to see the game the way assistant coach Simon Goodwin has, too.
"I love the head-to-head side of it and that's keeping me pretty excited every week, but as simple as the role is it's also a bit complicated," Viney said. "It's hard to explain but you have to know where you are, where your man is and then make that decision about who's in the most dangerous position and decide what to do from there.
"It's not something you want to make a mistake with and I guess that's where my development will hopefully be by the end of the year, being able to limit guys but also impact the game more myself."
Viney has become better prepared in other ways, too. He has always done all he could to play as well as possible, but those things always tended to be active, physical things: more recovery sessions, extra touch. The 21-year-old has always been open to ideas, and at the start of the year his dad had some good advice for him. (It wasn't anything to do with the insurance advertisement Jack and Todd starred in together, which Jack estimates will end up with him paying for at least half the team's end-of-season trip through peer-issued fines. "I didn't get any good feedback!")
Todd Viney wondered if there was more Jack could be doing to improve his football mind – the way he studied the game and thought about it. It was something, he told his son, that he had left until too late in his career to start doing as seriously as he could. Jack has started watching other teams play again, more closely and with less emotional investment.
He's tried to work out what the best midfielders do, and how they do it. He has started taking his hard drive into the club early each week, copying the weekend's game onto it so that he can take it home and cut up his own edits, think them through, take them back in and show Goodwin.
It has made him feel like a student, and he has liked that. "I love learning so to make footy feel like more of a school or uni environment has certainly helped me feel like I'm learning a lot and getting smarter about the game," he said. "When you do your own edits you have to think about things a bit more and you get to see all the decisions you make in a game that take you closer to playing well and further away from playing well, and I'm trying to ingrain all that in my head.
"My old man told me I needed to watch more vision and when Simon Goodwin came to the club and told me it's what Dyson Heppell did at Essendon, I thought 'I've got to start doing that too'. I just love to learn and talk to people about football and have as many experiences as I can early in my career. You can't just go out there and smash in and be competitive and think that's going to be enough. That's all evolving for me at the moment and I just want to take in as much as I can."
