JACK Viney says he hasn’t set his sights on a leadership position, despite his outstanding ability to lead from the front, even for a player so young.
The outstanding, young, hard at it midfielder says he simply wants to focus on leading by example – whether that comes with officialdom or not.
“I haven’t really got my eyes set on being part of the leadership group,” he told melbournefc.com.au.
“I just want to be a leader, with or without the title.
“It’s what I’ve done naturally, growing up. My Mum and Dad, and my family, have really instilled those values into me, so being a leader … it’s something I try to do.
“I’ll just keep doing that and wherever it takes me, it’ll be a good result.”
Viney, who played 13 matches in his first season, also missed eight weeks throughout the year with a toe injury.
He said he learned plenty from dealing with adversity.
“I just got through [the year]. I missed a fair chunk through the middle of [the year]. I look back on my first year as a massive learning experience,” he said.
“I just feel like I’ve matured so much as a player over the last season.
“At the start of the year, I didn’t have too many expectations on myself. I just wanted to get a game and personally from a team point of view, I thought we were going to do better than we’d gone. In pre-season, everyone was training well, and our game plan was looking good at that stage of the year.”
Viney said he had learned some valuable lessons from his dad, Todd – the Melbourne great and now its general manager of player personnel and strategy – about backing up from his inaugural season.
“I’ll try and have another big pre-season. With my dad having played footy before, he said that he had a pretty good first season as well and he got pretty happy with himself in his next two to three seasons, which were pretty sloppy,” he said.
“So I’m pretty keen for that not to happen to me.
“I’ve seen players having really good first seasons and then dropping away, so I really just want to keep progressing and developing into a good player.”
