It was the trade period of 1993 and Craig Lambert – a best-and-fairest winning rover at Richmond – was hoping to get to North Melbourne. The Kangaroos were at the beginning of a steep ascent up the ladder, on the back of a young superstar named Wayne Carey.
Instead he ended up at the "bad news" Brisbane Bears, which had finished the season with just four wins. He had no intention of staying. "I remember saying to my fiancée, who's now my wife [Melissa], that we'll be here two years and be back in Melbourne," Lambert told The Age newpsaper.
But Brisbane exerted a pull on the Lamberts, who stayed 17 years, raising four children now aged from 13 to 20. And while Lambert just missed out on the club's golden era as a player – he retired at the end of 2000 – he enjoyed its success as an assistant to then-coach Leigh Matthews.
And now, after five years at the Greater Western Sydney Giants, he and Melissa are back in the role where they were both most dearly missed. While Craig wears the label of welfare manager, this husband-and-wife team are effectively player whisperers and nurturers.
Their job is simple: get players to stay, something that the Lions have struggled with since Lambert took up the challenge at the Giants.
Lambert's job, in an era of increased player power and easier freedom of movement, is harder than ever. But he is an incurable optimist, and he has the runs on the board to back it up.
"I kept on hearing the experts down in Melbourne saying: 'Give every draft pick in the world to GWS because within two or three years we'll get them back to their home state,'" he says.
"I thought that was quite arrogant, to tell you the truth, because I'd played at the Brisbane Bears/Lions, and I'd seen guys like [Simon] Black and [Jonathan] Brown and [Justin] Leppitsch and [Nigel] Lappin and all these wonderful players stay the course.
The Lamberts are all about building networks of families and friends.
"We say we don't draft the player, we draft the family," Craig says. "For that to work, you need the whole club to have a holistic approach with welfare."
The Lambert's approach is the opposite of tough love. It's just love, and lots of it. "The whole emphasis at the Giants for the first two or three years was you knew that because they were so young, that they were going to lose, and they were probably going to lose by a lot. So we just tried to create an incredible family environment."
So, last weekend, the club had an induction period, not just for its new players: "We have been able to recruit six magnificent families to our club," Lambert wrote on Instagram. He likens it to a "big buddy system", and 18-year-olds living away from home for the first time need all the friends they can get.
Now, everyone in the club is responsible. "There's a lot of people at this football club that do an amazing job, and they might have different titles, but they all have a welfare component, which is critical for those non-football states when you're trying to connect those players and families, and retain them for a long period of time."
It was family that drew Lambert back to Brisbane, too. When they moved to Sydney, their homesick eldest daughter Brylee, then 15, told her parents she would be back in Brisbane the moment she turned 18 – a promise that she kept.
"We've always seen Brisbane as being where we want to live, and we always wanted to have our family together," Lambert says. "We had an absolute ball building the Giants, but you've got to work out where you want to live.
"So we made the choice to come back to Queensland and obviously we had the opportunity to come back to the Brisbane Lions and help out a club that we love."
