Hard work continues for East Perth co-captain Lee

HARD work has always been the hallmark of Brendan Lee’s career and the East Perth co-captain has no doubt that doing just that is what’s needed from his team to bounce back from a tough start to the 2013 WAFL season.

Lee had to do the hard yards early in his career at East Perth after moving up from Busselton and played mostly reserves football for two and-a-half years before playing some good football in East Perth’s midfield throughout 2009.

Then coming into 2010, he worked tremendously hard to become perhaps the fittest and hardest working player in the WAFL and that saw him have two outstanding seasons in 2010 and 2011, culminating in winning the fairest and best in 2011 and then being rookie-listed by Essendon.

Despite being hampered by injury, he won the Bendigo Bombers’ VFL fairest and best award and showed some good signs in two games in the AFL for Essendon, but found himself delisted at the end of 2012 and was quick to decide to return to East Perth to build on his 63-game league career.

The start to the season didn’t go to plan, though, with East Perth managing just one goal after half-time to end up losing by 75 points to West Perth.

It left a sour taste in Lee’s mouth, and indeed everyone else at East Perth, and he now is backing the Royals to bounce back strongly this Saturday against Peel Thunder at Medibank Stadium.

“Obviously going up to Joondalup is always a game we try to ramp ourselves up for and it was pretty disappointing to finish off the second half like we did, and not even rally and fight back,” Lee said.

“We had a really good start to the second quarter and we were up by about three goals, but we were pretty flat coming into half-time after West Perth had kicked a few quick goals. To be honest, everyone is just really keen to get back to a game this week and improve on that last half for sure.”