Strategy Aggressive reset

[The acurate one]

Well, we might get a rude bloody shock when we don't......nothing wrong with the players thinking they can win though.

Unless it's Ben Cunnington, it won't make a whole lot of difference......I look forward to JZ playing 5 mins and breaking down again....

Now, now Micky don't be like that I like Cpt Jack. I assume the two losses would be Port and WCE. mate could have easily won last week.
I wonder whether we can still finish ninth? Fingers crossed I suppose

 

[Passmore]

Now, now Micky don't be like that I like Cpt Jack. I assume the two losses would be Port and WCE. mate could have easily won last week.
I wonder whether we can still finish ninth? Fingers crossed I suppose

I luuub Cap'n Jack.......not sure his hamstrings/calves luuub him to the same degree right now....at least Rhyce was smart enough to throw big X into a centre bounce when we were looking a chance.....

Will Brad present us with our Cup when we do rattle home for ninth?

 

[The acurate one]

I luuub Cap'n Jack.......not sure his hamstrings/calves luuub him to the same degree right now....at least Rhyce was smart enough to throw big X into a centre bounce when we were looking a chance.....

Will Brad present us with our Cup when we do rattle home for ninth?

Could happen, he'd be teary and oh so proud. I just hope we have a shitload more season ending but in fine fettle for preseason injuries.

 

[Psicosis]

North coach from up north

North Melbourne coach Rhyce Shaw shared an insight into his first season as a full-time coach

player.whooshkaa.com

"We think we can turn it around really quickly." - Rhys

It's interviews/comments like this that don't fill me with a huge amount of confidence that we are going to take the time to get the list right.

 

[ferball]

What’s more likely? North finishes mid table again as it has for 10 years, or we magically rise up the ladder to be a top side.

I get that you live our club, as i do, and you want us to be a top team. I do too.

But we are a mid table side, reliant on guys over 30. That’s just the reality.

Realistically this year I'd have been happy with 4 - 8 and win a few finals. I think that was where our best side was at before everything went crazy injury and COVID wise. Capable of being better but also not at its peak.

It's not magic. It's a steady improvement based on the reasons I set out in the post above. Steady improvements in list quality and coaching.

This year it's been shown we aren't just reliant on guys over 30. We needed Cunnington, Larkey and Brown available but we have seen the improvement in Jy, now LDU, Taylor, even tho he is raw. Kyron Hayden. Even Bonar and Mahoney.

Anderson has really stepped up as tho he has more room to improve as well. Froggy is playing unreal footy. LMac and BMac too. Without COVID Daw plays from round one. A coach giving some of these young guys opportunity and setting standards ... We were due to improve and we need to examine why we didn't.

Injuries exposed structural weaknesses IMO. Our depth is our problem. And some of our older players have been an issue.

 

[Psicosis]

Realistically this year I'd have been happy with 4 - 8 and win a few finals. I think that was where our best side was at before everything went crazy injury and COVID wise. Capable of being better but also not at its peak.

Jesus Christ

 

[Tas]

It still doesn't justify the claim.

I wasn't justifying the claim, just providing information.

 

[ferball]

You have (supposedly) been here for a grand total of 32 days and have the entire forum analysed & categorized?

He's a long term poster who has one account going when he is here.

 

[ferball]

Jesus Christ

That is also what the coach and the club named as their expected result. Not playing finals was a failure.

That is where we are - the season is a failure. We just disagree on how to deal with that, and probably not as much as it seems right now.

 

[7577969923]

Jesus Christ

It is easy to be sceptical in hindsight but after the win against the Giants in Round 2 we were 10 ins and 5 losses from our last 15. That is top 8 form.

 

[Psicosis]

It is easy to be sceptical in hindsight but after the win against the Giants in Round 2 we were 10 ins and 5 losses from our last 15. That is top 8 form.

It is easy to be realistic in hindsight. Injuries aren’t the difference between 4th and 17th.

 

[7577969923]

It is easy to be realistic in hindsight. Injuries aren’t the difference between 4th and 17th.

I'm not making that claim, just that perhaps the optimism wasn't completely misplaced.

 

[Tas]

Realistically this year I'd have been happy with 4 - 8 and win a few finals. I think that was where our best side was at before everything went crazy injury and COVID wise. Capable of being better but also not at its peak.

It's not magic. It's a steady improvement based on the reasons I set out in the post above. Steady improvements in list quality and coaching.

This year it's been shown we aren't just reliant on guys over 30. We needed Cunnington, Larkey and Brown available but we have seen the improvement in Jy, now LDU, Taylor, even tho he is raw. Kyron Hayden. Even Bonar and Mahoney.

Anderson has really stepped up as tho he has more room to improve as well. Froggy is playing unreal footy. LMac and BMac too. Without COVID Daw plays from round one. A coach giving some of these young guys opportunity and setting standards ... We were due to improve and we need to examine why we didn't.

Injuries exposed structural weaknesses IMO. Our depth is our problem. And some of our older players have been an issue.

The problem is we have never been consistent and it is our flaws that make us inconsistent. I do not judge a team by the best performances but by the worst performances and the variance between the good and bad. Kicking 1 goal one week and 22 goals the next isn't some kind of basis you can plot a positive progression where you can make the top 4.

To make the top 4, at worst you can have 7 losses, some years it is 6 losses maximum, it is rarely as high as 5 and very rarely more than 7.

Teams are going to have ups and downs, good and bad games but if your worst performances are up to a high enough standard then you have a hope of avoiding losing too many games. When your standard is all over the place, the best you can hope for is to be mediocre because you will drop too many games. Good teams are judged by how strong they are defensively. Collingwood is in the top 8 and they have kicked fewer points than us.

The amount of easy goals we repeatedly cough up almost on a weekly basis through unforced errors and bad matchups is just mind blowing, we should easily be a four goal better team with having 4 less goals kicked against us just by having a proper exit strategy coming out of our defensive 50 other than just booting it down the line and not conceding so many easy shots on goals against us due to inadequate skill levels. We are so bad defensively that sometimes we exit out of the defensive 50 only to go back into the defensive 50 with a sloppy kick and cough up goals. You wouldn't get a game in the amateurs doing that.

If you cut 24 points off everyone's score against us last year when we lost 8 games by 24 or less points, we may have still lost a couple of them if the margin was closer, some clubs might have gone harder instead of coasting, but we would have been closer to the 5-6 loss range rather than the 12 we copped.

This year 5 of our 9 losses were 14 points or less.

The problem isn't who is out injured, it is who is in our side and how we play footy and the skill level we accept and the gameplan we are trying to execute.

Not enough has changed from the Scott era to hope for something different.

You can start hoping for better once you see us stop consistently giving the opposition cheap/free goal after goal, the ones we aren't getting on a silver platter from sides that are hoping to contend.

 

[ferball]

Well for starters, no, I said in 2018 that we were shooting ourselves in the foot re draft position in a super draft. See my posts ( and others) after we beat the swans in the Mason Wood game.

But that’s irrelevant anyway. I’m not sure I understand your argument. You seem to place no weight on results or outcomes but heaps on hypotheticals.

They fact is no decent players want to come to north.

The fact is during our “rebuild” we have had 1 top 5 pick.

The fact is we currently sit second last on the ladder, 4 years into our rebuild.

The fact is we rely on players at, near or over 30.

The fact is that we just fired a coach that said we need a rebuild.

The fact is that our current coach seemed to say the same 2 weeks ago, now isn’t so sure.

But you and others seem to take personal offence when we criticise the club for the way the last 3 years (and probably the previous 10 too) have been handled. You seem to want to only look at hypothetical, best case scenarios rather than the cold hard depressing facts in front of you.

Ive asked this before but how could or should we have hit the draft harder in 2018?

 

[ferball]

The problem is we have never been consistent and it is our flaws that make us inconsistent. I do not judge a team by the best performances but by the worst performances and the variance between the good and bad. Kicking 1 goal one week and 22 goals the next isn't some kind of basis you can plot a positive progression where you can make the top 4.

To make the top 4, at worst you can have 7 losses, some years it is 6 losses maximum, it is rarely as high as 5 and very rarely more than 7.

Teams are going to have ups and downs, good and bad games but if your worst performances are up to a high enough standard then you have a hope of avoiding losing too many games. When your standard is all over the place, the best you can hope for is to be mediocre because you will drop too many games. Good teams are judged by how strong they are defensively. Collingwood is in the top 8 and they have kicked fewer points than us.

The amount of easy goals we repeatedly cough up almost on a weekly basis through unforced errors and bad matchups is just mind blowing, we should easily be a four goal better team with having 4 less goals kicked against us just by having a proper exit strategy coming out of our defensive 50 other than just booting it down the line and not conceding so many easy shots on goals against us due to inadequate skill levels. We are so bad defensively that sometimes we exit out of the defensive 50 only to go back into the defensive 50 with a sloppy kick and cough up goals. You wouldn't get a game in the amateurs doing that.

If you cut 24 points off everyone's score against us last year when we lost 8 games by 24 or less points, we may have still lost a couple of them if the margin was closer, some clubs might have gone harder instead of coasting, but we would have been closer to the 5-6 loss range rather than the 12 we copped.

This year 5 of our 9 losses were 14 points or less.

The problem isn't who is out injured, it is who is in our side and how we play footy and the skill level we accept and the gameplan we are trying to execute.

Not enough has changed from the Scott era to hope for something different.

You can start hoping for better once you see us stop consistently giving the opposition cheap/free goal after goal, the ones we aren't getting on a silver platter from sides that are hoping to contend.

See a progression would mean finishing between 4 and 8. Then winning at least one final, more if we are fourth or fifth.

Not finishing top four except scraping in with an even final eight.

That would be later.

 

[the big lebowski]

Ive asked this before but how could or should we have hit the draft harder in 2018?

Numerous options

Trade up

Trade out (to 2019)

Not win the final game of the season when finals was gone

Or as consistent with a rebuilding side play McKay, Durdin, Larkey. Play Simpkin mid for the year, cunners forward. You know, actually rebuild. My memory of that time is that we were playing an old team week in week out and calling it a young rebuilding side.

 

[ChoppyGun]

North coach from up north

North Melbourne coach Rhyce Shaw shared an insight into his first season as a full-time coach

player.whooshkaa.com

"We think we can turn it around really quickly." - Rhys

It's interviews/comments like this that don't fill me with a huge amount of confidence that we are going to take the time to get the list right.

Maybe Rhyce doesn't have such a negative view of our list like you do?

I'm with Rhyce. We have plenty of young talent and I think can turn quickly unlike say, Adelaide or Hawks who have very poor youth.

No reason we can't be contesting as a serious club in a couple of years with a fit list along with drafting and trading.

 

[ferball]

It is easy to be realistic in hindsight. Injuries aren’t the difference between 4th and 17th.

I said fourth to eighth ie the bottom half of the eight this year. We are four games from that and lost five games by under two and a half goals while our forward structure was borked due to Larkey and Daw not playing and giving us an extra target to chop out Brown.

While missing Ben Cunnington.

We lost nine games without him and our win record with him is 50%. So him not injured makes us at least four games better a side.

Brown and Larkey have a ten nine win loss ratio when playing together since Larkey won the Frosty MillerMedal, it's even better since the announcement of Scott being sacked. But let's go with that first one. They have an approximately fifty fifty win loss ratio when they have played together higher since Shaw. This season it's exactly that for the two games the played. We are two and eight from the games they didn't play together.

We are also missing the likes of Thomas, Taylor, Ziebell (10 brownlow vites last year when reasonably fit), Turner who you probably don't rate but holds our defensive forward structure together. Others. But they don't have a demonstratable structural role with figures available to back up its importance.

 

[ferball]

Numerous options

Trade up

Trade out (to 2019)

Not win the final game of the season when finals was gone

Or as consistent with a rebuilding side play McKay, Durdin, Larkey. Play Simpkin mid for the year, cunners forward. You know, actually rebuild. My memory of that time is that we were playing an old team week in week out and calling it a young rebuilding side.

How specifically would we have traded up?

How would we have traded out? Details again please.

What or who would we have traded to do those things?

Are you suggesting we deliberately throw the game against St Kilda, who were a rabble? Given how that draft order finished we'd have probably been busted. Three years earlier we tried something similar and the AFL didnt like it at all.

Larkey stayed in the VFL for good reason. It seems to me that keeping him in the VFL in 2018 actually made him as a player. He learned how to play as a dominant forward. You can see it in his game now. Playing him against better backman would have hindered his development IMO. He wouldn't have been able to develop and learn his forward craft with the room to make small errors and learn from them.

MacKay and Durdin didn't get games because Majak Daw turned into a very effective footballer. Should we have not tried Maj on the backline. Delisted him instead?

 

[shimaburnsgrieg]

So according to an AFL footballer, who may play for North Melb or not....

Lists will be 36! - if true there will be a aggressive reset. I counted 45 players on our list currently. Add in any new recruits , and at least four draft picks. Crikey! Surely though lists will be 38?

Also.....

We haven't borrowed the money from the AFL we thought we would, that's a great thing.
We will run lean for the next 2-3 years, fu** to that !.

And the bit that is rattling around in my head and I'm not happy with is according to the guy mentioned in the first sentence, we think we can win FOUR of our LAST SIX!!!. We just won't learn (kick cat emoji), will have a few back this week as well. And JZ will play against GC in two weeks time.

Of all the years, just suck it up North FFS- he's an idea, win four of the first six next season .

Take of this what you will, and ignore if you want

Alot of goss there TAO.

I'm not sure how connected your contact is but he doesn't even know how many games we have left. It's 5 not 6!

Lists of 36 would be acceptable if they add 2 to 4 rookies to that.

If there were no rookies - just a list of 36 - all clubs would need to cut deep - there would end up being quite a few DFA's that would attract our interest so we would cut extremely deep. Alot of players considered safe on here would all of a sudden be kicked to the curb.

 

[the big lebowski]

How specifically would we have traded up?

How would we have traded out? Details again please.

What or who would we have traded to do those things?

Are you suggesting we deliberately throw the game against St Kilda, who were a rabble? Given how that draft order finished we'd have probably been busted. Three years earlier we tried something similar and the AFL didnt like it at all.

Larkey stayed in the VFL for good reason. It seems to me that keeping him in the VFL in 2018 actually made him as a player. He learned how to play as a dominant forward. You can see it in his game now. Playing him against better backman would have hindered his development IMO. He wouldn't have been able to develop and learn his forward craft with the room to make small errors and learn from them.

MacKay and Durdin didn't get games because Majak Daw turned into a very effective footballer. Should we have not tried Maj on the backline. Delisted him instead?

We were in win at all cost mode. Kept and played Waite. Kept and played Thompson. Preuss didn’t get much of a look in.

We played the old blokes, called it rebuilding, and finished ninth.

 

[ChoppyGun]

Preuss didn’t get much of a look in.

Because he is a very ordinary player.

Demons have found that out too. (shame we didn't trade better in return but it's done now)

You seem insistent on bagging our previous decisions (even correct ones), and I'm not sure why and what it achieves.

 

[shimaburnsgrieg]

The positive extent of the reset so far can be seen in our forward line.

Compare this forward line which will line up Round 1 next year

HF C. Taylor, J Walker, B Scott
F Zurhaar, Larkey, T.Thomas

to these 6 forwards we have mixed and matched with over the past 2 years (4 of which wont be at the club next year and the other 2 no longer best 22 come next year)

HF Garner, Wood, Hall
F Ziebull, Brown, Turner

The midfield is nearly through its reset - just needs to add 1 elite mid and 1 more depth mid and that will be achieved this draft. The Goldie successor is problematic - that is something for next years trade period though.

The backline still needs a little work - another kpd and highly skilled hbf'r is required - that might be achieved this draft or may take another year. Taz, BMac, KH, EVW and LMac are a good start for next year.

The next 2 draft/trade periods are critical - we wont be afforded the luxury of resetting any longer than 2 years so we need to get it right this year and next.

 

[The acurate one]

Alot of goss there TAO.

I'm not sure how connected your contact is but he doesn't even know how many games we have left. It's 5 not 6!

Lists of 36 would be acceptable if they add 2 to 4 rookies to that.

If there were no rookies - just a list of 36 - all clubs would need to cut deep - there would end up being quite a few DFA's that would attract our interest so we would cut extremely deep. Alot of players considered safe on here would all of a sudden be kicked to the curb.

Haha - I'll tell him that. Yeah not sure if rookies will be added to the 36, you would think so.

 

[LB2Snake]

******* nepoptism though based on your username!

Heheheheh.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty confident my username was first. But yeah, fair point.
There’s only a couple I have on ignore, purely as it’s the same post a lot of the time.
I’m happy to hear all thoughts and feelings. Plus there is some funny fkrs on here.