MIDFIELDER Christian Salem says adapting to the defensive side of the game was one of the biggest challenges he faced in his first year.

The classy 19-year-old, who was Melbourne’s first pick in last year’s NAB AFL Draft (No.9 overall), said it was one of the key areas he had to work on in 2014.

“You come in getting drafted knowing you’ve got your attacking flair and the good thing for me was getting our defensive stuff right,” he told Dee TV.

“Looking back on that, I think that compromised my attacking stuff … so hopefully with a full pre-season under my belt, I’ll be able to [play] a bit more offensively, because at the moment, I think I did well with the defensive side of things.”

Salem said getting the offensive/defensive balance right was the key.

“You come in and think you’ve got to do all your offensive stuff and make the coaches think you look good,” he said.

“They’ve been watching all the tapes – they know what you’ve been doing and they want to see what you’ve been doing defensively, because AFL is a lot of running and it makes you very accountable.

“That was the hardest thing for me – getting that balance right early on, but following a few guys around and getting that stuff right was the best thing to happen to me this year, even though it compromised my offensive stuff a bit.

“Next year, I’ll show that a bit more and the defensive stuff.”

Overall, Salem said the workload had been the biggest challenge in his first year, which included 12 AFL matches, after he made his debut in round six against the Sydney Swans at the MCG.

“Your training loads don’t decrease that much. You’ve got to be so consistent to get that work in and backing up with weights and seeing how my body responded, [but then] I had those thyroid problems early on,” he said.

“I couldn’t really do as much coming into the season, so that’s when I had to try and play a little bit of catch up and that was probably the biggest [hurdle] for me.”