Emerging AFL star Jeremy Cameron’s take on speculation about Lance Franklin and other mooted Greater Western Sydney recruits speaks volumes about him.
“That’ll happen at the end of the season. I’ll be back in Dartmoor when it does happen, so I’ll be pretty relaxed,” Cameron says of his tiny hometown, 400km west of Melbourne.
Relaxed is an apt way to describe 20-year-old Cameron – a trait he’s retained despite being joint leader of the AFL’s Coleman medal race two weeks out from the end of the regular season.
Cameron would be the youngest Coleman medal winner since John Longmire in 1990 and the fifth to win the goal-kicking award from a last-placed team – presuming the Giants can’t dislodge Melbourne from 17th.
But even such feats don’t really put his sensational second AFL season, in which he’s already kicked 60 goals, in perspective.
Cameron didn’t play his first competitive Australian Rules match until he was 15.
In the absence of Dartmoor junior teams, he instead turned to fishing, hunting and golf – hobbies he still pursues when given time off.
“There were some big trees in our front yard that made an archway and I made the old man cut it in half so they sat up like goal posts. I pretty much kicked my goals there,” Cameron said of his junior football career.
Asked one time to fill in for Dartmoor’s reserves while he was trying to get his golf handicap into single figures, Cameron kicked 72 goals in his first full season and word quickly spread of the boy wonder.
He impressed with North Ballarat Rebels, the closest under-18 TAC Cup team, and was pre-listed by GWS as part of their start-up list concessions.
“Every club in the AFL would love to have him, we’re just fortunate … the clubs allowed us to,” GWS coach Kevin Sheedy says with a glint in his eye.
It was obvious to Al McConnell, GWS’s head of development and the first coach to join Team GWS, as it was known at the embryonic stage, that he should pre-list Cameron.
But at that point Cameron had never been to the MCG, let alone Melbourne airport or Sydney.
“It was a massive life change for him,” McConnell said.
“Because it all happened so fast, the advice we initially got was ‘maybe he needed another year to get his head around where he’s going. Or maybe we should offer a contract and let him stay home for another 12 months’.
“It was more around how it would work, rather than whether we should get him or not. There was absolutely no doubt … that he had the potential to be a very good player.”
But not quite this good, this quickly.
Since finding his feet in the big city, Cameron has gone from strength to awe-inspiring strength.
Wayne Carey, four-time Coleman medallist Peter Hudson and countless opposition coaches have queued up to anoint him the league’s next superstar forward.
In many ways, Cameron has changed.
He talks of improved leading patterns, Sheedy lauds his leadership. McConnell rates the pressure acts he’s added to his game this season.
“This sounds ridiculous I know, because we’re talking about a bloke who kicks goals. But he’s playing more defence than he used to,” he said.
“He was basically a non-tackler at the beginning of the year, he now does that and it provides opportunities for shots on goal for both him and his teammates.
“…The thing that impressed me about Jeremy when we first saw him was it was ‘see ball, get ball’.
“Now he’s starting to learn some of the subtleties of the game.”
Cameron has also become more diligent when it comes to training, recovery, preparation and even sleep – how best to handle his love of banking upwards of 13 hours shut-eye a night.
Some things however remain the same. Perhaps most encouragingly his humility, despite the regular plaudits and pump-ups.
“I definitely need to work on my engine, get that bigger, and work on some other things,” he says unprompted.