Trust on a football field: Round 6, 2024 v Hawthorn

Trust is a funny thing.

It has to be earned, so the cliché goes. Yet when 23 players run out to play a brutal, full contact sport and put their body on the line for every second of 120 minutes and then some, there’s an implicit understanding to trust the person beside you.

Trust to play their role, trust to make the decisions they’re supposed to make, trust to move to the right areas. Without that word – trust – a team has nothing to fall back on.

And when a team has nothing to fall back on in the beginning stage of their development, they turn in their worst half since Alastair Clarkson took the reins. Narrowly beating out the second half from last time North Melbourne played Hawthorn, for whatever that’s worth.

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How does one measure trust? Is it even possible to do that?

What we do know is when a team has it across all lines and in how their teammates will play, we see things like the best of Collingwood over 2022 and 2023. When the trust is shaken, either through a change in personnel or plans, opposition form, second guessing movements, or all the above, we see Collingwood’s shaky start to 2024.

For North Melbourne that top line level is still a dream. But even at their current stage of development, trust is arguably even more crucial – simply due to not having the margin for error other teams enjoy.

Without any margin for error, everything has to go right to stay in games regardless of whether it’s against Brisbane, Geelong, or a fellow 0-5 team in Hawthorn.

In the second quarter everything started to go wrong, and the house of cards fell down.

It was most noticeable in the back half of the ground because errors there are magnified. Take this passage for example. There are so many mistakes from a position that starts at even numbers. The two keys to focus on here are:

– Multiple instances of sending two players to the ball carrier and leaving easy outlets
– Multiple Roos staying defensive side of the ball instead of proactively pressuring opponents

This comes from players having no trust in their teammates to get the job done, so they either retreat or overcompensate depending on their mentality.

Then when a team is struggling and the trust is gone, it creeps into the offensive side of the game and manifests in a deferential mindset.

A couple of minutes after the first clip, North force a turnover on the attacking side of the centre circle and are off to the races for a sure-fire scoring shot.

If North weren’t under siege, Zane Duursma takes a shot from just outside 50 with an empty square. But doubts creep in for a split second. Am I supposed to take a shot? Should I handball it to Nick Larkey instead? What is my role? What should I do?

The result: A rushed handball after taking a couple too many steps, Larkey is swarmed as he hesitates, and possession is lost.

To repeat the same thing I do every week, so no one gets the wrong impression: This isn’t about singling out individuals, especially a sixth-gamer in this case. It’s about highlighting the general team mentality.

The last line of defence is a litmus test for how a team is feeling. In this case Darcy Tucker, in his role as a winger, drops too deep for Hawthorn’s inside 50 – an admirable mindset of wanting to help, but not what was needed in his position – because without any aerial influence, it leaves Harry Morrison with entirely too much room.

Then Tucker sees Tristan Xerri closing in on Connor MacDonald at the top of the goal square. Tucker’s responsibility is still Morrison, lurking in space. But Tucker opts to help off Morrison and be the second player to the tackler.

There are times where sending an extra player to the ball is the correct decision. But on the last line of defence with an easy offensive outlet waiting is exactly not the time. The basketball aficionados reading will know the concept of never helping off the strong side corner. This is basically the AFL equivalent. Do not help from one easy pass away.

Again, it happens because there was a lack of trust from Tucker in his teammate doing his job. It made things much easier for Hawthorn as the clip shows.

The easiest page to spot for everyone in this book is when more players go up to spoil than what’s needed. Immediately after the Morrison goal, that exact thing happened.

Watch the reverse angle, see the aerial presence North have and the complete lack of ground presence as a result. Three players jumping to spoil one Hawk is entirely too much. Two makes sense, which will make sense in just a second.

To say the same thing for the millionth time in this post, it only happens because players don’t trust each other to do their role. In a functioning team there’s adequate aerial and ground presence, and MacDonald doesn’t gather with enough space to snap through.

Then when something like the above happens, the natural reaction is to overcompensate the next time. Like the cricket bowler following up a half tracker with a half volley, it trends too far in the other direction.

So when Lloyd Meek belts one out of the centre, the regulation play is for Nyuon to peel off and either intercept mark or thump it into the third row. But arguably spooked by previous Hawthorn entries, he’s indecisive, too slow to react, and ends up propping front and centre. It allows the ball to sail over the back and bounce through.

It’s never, ever a goal that should unfold the way it does.

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These are all clips that happen for nearly the same reason: there is no trust in each other, which then permeates into everyone’s own role. A quote from a chat with Sam Gibson more than 10 years ago has stuck with me ever since for the insight it provided to a team struggling to find their way:

“Usually when you’re not doing too well you sort of internalise and worry about yourself, years of evolution have taught us that way, which means you can go away from your role.”

To this day it’s still the only time someone has mentioned evolution (not the WWE stable) in an interview, but there’s still time.

Because after all, if you have no trust in your teammate, how can you trust your own role? When you start worrying about yourself, you second guess what you’re supposed to do. Do I go help this time? Do I focus on my direct opponent this time instead? Wait what do I do now? It’s too late, we’ve just conceded another goal.

In theory this issue – trust in teammates and roles – is more controllable than longer-term fixes around experience and games which can only be resolved with time.

This is a mindset issue relatively easier to coach than magically inputting 50 games into players or adding the requisite size to withstand a full season of bumps and knocks.

Because nearly every coach will say a variation of the same thing when asked about mistakes: ‘We’d rather <player> make an error taking the game on and playing the way we want him to play’.

If Roos make errors that way, it means one less step required to fix it. In theory they’re already playing with the method they’re supposed to, and they know there’s strong support from coaches.

But when errors come from different positions and a muddled, retreating mind, it takes a whole reset of mind and structure to get everyone on the same path again.

It’s human nature to start to doubt a process that isn’t producing tangible results. No doubt part of the regression has been due to early results, and perhaps it’s where the brutal fixture to start 2024 played a part.

Would things have been different if Hawthorn were in Round 1 or 2, instead of 6? If one of those first six games were against a Richmond side about two injuries away from having the camel as their best key forward option?

We’ll never know for sure, but what we do know is committing to an approach and going full steam ahead is much better than the caught between two worlds mindset the team is currently in.

Commit to the aggressive, attacking ball movement we saw at the start of the year, defend up behind it, then own the results. It’s clearly how they want to play in the future and there’s next to no harm in diving fully into it so every opposition can be attacked with and without the ball.

To oversimplify too much, from North’s current status it essentially comes down to one of two choices:

a) Live with the consequences of aggressive offence and defence
b) Live with the consequences of retreating defence and static offence

Personal opinion: Trust yourself, the person next to you in the blue and white jumper, and take challenges front on. Timidity on a football field helps no one and gets nowhere.