Right. Where are you supposed to start with North Melbourne after a game like that?
There’s the first quarter run; eight of the first nine goals kicked on route to a 35-point lead at the first break.
Then there was the back half of the second quarter; five of the last six goals and entering the rooms with a 48-point lead.
Even most of the third quarter went well, repelling the first Collingwood push to still lead by 44 points with about five minutes remaining.
Although that prompted the trademark Magpie overload and North had no answers as the lead slowly – and then not so slowly – decreased.
There were plenty of reasons for the last quarter and a bit, all building into a crescendo that’ll be hard to top for most manic finish of the year.
With some help from the umpiring fraternity on the latter as well.
Covering all the above in depth (except the umpiring part) is a daunting task. But we’ll give it a shot, starting with what prompted the blistering start.
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Sunday was the first full game this year where North had a three tall forward look, last week’s attempt cruelly cut short early due to Wil Dawson’s injury.
Regular readers have seen more than enough of my constant droning about how important key forward support is for Nick Larkey. But for those stumbling across this blog for the first time – a possibility considering North were just nine goals up on the reigning premiers – cliff notes:
– Extra key forwards (who can command any sort of attention) spread an opposition defence
– Which in turn allows North more options to move the ball
– Whether short with chip and run
– Or long to targets if need be
– In summary: more space to use in possession can only be a good thing
It comes most into play after turnovers, because when a defence is scrambling to reset they have more options to consider instead of, ‘quick, everyone sit on Larkey’s head’.
Brynn Teakle, on North debut, along with Toby Pink, are nobody’s idea of world beating key forwards. But, as silly as it sounds, simply being tall is a valuable asset, especially when combined with serviceably playing a role.
Take this passage for North’s second goal of the game. 10 of North’s 14 first half goals actually came from turnovers, which must be their highest mark in many a year.
After the scramble and turnover on the wing, followed by George Wardlaw’s centring kick, we see the three talls working in tandem. In this case, Teakle is a bit higher, and Pink is out of Larkey’s way, the latter with space in front of him in the pocket.
If only it was always this simple.
Because of the way Collingwood defend, it’s vital – arguably more so than any other opponent – to hit a target with the first kick after forcing a turnover. The swarm is hard to cope with but if the first target is hit, it opens up so many opportunities.
In this clip it’s Cam Zurhaar who gets the mark inside 50 (with his set shot eventually marked by Larkey on the line), but the reason he has that space is because the forward line as a whole is spread out and uses Collingwood’s swarm against them.
The short kick from Darcy Tucker to Harry Sheezel beforehand just wasn’t available in previous weeks when North only had one key forward. Opponents knew to squeeze up and cover those because there was only one long option.
On Sunday there were multiple long options, which allowed more space for the shorter options when possible.
And when all areas were flowing at once, there was just so much space to be had.
Look at all the options available throughout this whole chain after Tucker gathers on the defensive side of the centre.
It’s a best-case glimpse at what things look like when a better version of this team is firing on all cylinders down the track. A half of it on Sunday was plenty of fun.
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For those who have missed previous match analyses, here are links to the last five matches:
Foreign concepts: Round 13 v West Coast
Assessing and resetting: Round 11 v Port Adelaide
An individual focus: Round 10 v Essendon
Opening the mailbag: Round 9 v Gold Coast
Positional changes: Round 8 v St Kilda
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Collingwood’s injury list meant the team they rolled out on Sunday had half a dozen players whose ceilings are currently fringe player on a mediocre team* or simply aren’t ready for AFL level yet.
(*Before anyone comes to this post way down the track and scoffs at that paragraph, obviously things can change and we’re talking at this very moment)
It meant three things:
1) More asked of Collingwood’s best players
2) More system breakdowns, which allows
3) More room for North’s best players to have an influence
2) and 3) is what we saw through the second quarter and the early parts of the third, with 3) also influenced by North’s tweaks made at the bye.
Until Collingwood threw the magnets around halfway through the third quarter, it was Nick Daicos and Jack Crisp doing the heavy lifting on-ball. Will Phillips was on the former, and the latter was usually going head-to-head with either Luke Davies-Uniacke or George Wardlaw.
It meant one of those latter two Roos often found themselves against players they outclassed. And that’s before mentioning Harry Sheezel and Tom Powell’s on-ball stints.
Phillips, a late inclusion for the injured Jy Simpkin, played a tagging role on Daicos. While the merits of whether he should have been substituted could go back and forth for another thousand words, in the big picture it’s a continuation of what we saw last week.
When talking about Simpkin’s slight shift from a forward coming up to the midfield to a near full-time midfielder, I wrote the following:
More often than not, the ‘main’ on-ballers shoulder the brunt of responsibilities, particularly defensively. Meanwhile the half forwards coming up to the ball – whether for stoppages or in general play – are more so the second layer of operation. Still important to be sure, but not quite as much. So with Simpkin taking on the extra load, it allowed Sheezel and Powell to float around a bit more and use their creativity to good effect.
While Simpkin wouldn’t have applied an out and out tag on Daicos if he played, the general concept of taking on defensive responsibilities held firm in the transition from the co-captain to Phillips.
When Alastair Clarkson says this at the post-match press conference…
“We made some tweaks (at the bye) that hopefully you guys will have to work out rather than us telling you what they are. Pretty much we just needed to be more competitive around the footy and get stronger contest forward of the ball with some taller guys. That’s pretty much it really.”
‘Stronger contest forward of the ball’ refers to the extra talls we’ve already covered, and ‘more competitive around the footy’ refers to this shift in midfield rotations over the last fortnight with Simpkin and now Phillips.
Carving out a first-choice spot for more of the unheralded work allows explosive players to play their best. We saw it with Davies-Uniacke throughout the game (which isn’t a departure from his norm, but still), and particularly in Wardlaw’s first half with 22 disposals and 10 score involvements.
If this exact game happened pre-bye, one of Davies-Uniacke or Wardlaw would have spent large chunks of time on Daicos, with their own effectiveness naturally reduced as a result.
In the third quarter, when Collingwood balanced out general play, this midfield tweak allowed North to find some joy out of stoppages. While 10 of the 14 first-half goals came from turnover, all four third quarter goals started from clearances.
It’s all about finding as many avenues to goal as possible and these two post-bye changes have allowed North to open up some more. Kicking goals from Row F also helped on route to 18.2 at one stage, but that goes without saying.
But for all the positives, the analysis can’t finish without a look at what happened from late in the third quarter onwards. Buckle up…
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Collingwood’s last quarter switch is well known by this point. I’ve written about it multiple times, but this post – the last quarter of their win against Port Adelaide in Round 19, 2023 – is the most complete version I’ve done. In short, what the Pies do comes down to two things, as explained in the link:
“So much of a Collingwood final quarter comeback is about overwhelming the opposition. To oversimplify a touch, it’s done in two ways: speed and numbers. The former gets past a defence before they’re set, and the latter is based on being predictable to each other. If everyone knows their ball movement and running patterns, there will always be an option to use.”
On the surface, it sometimes looks like Russian Roulette football, a phrase Clarkson also used about in his post-match press conference:
“Some of the things they were doing, Russian Roulette whether it was going to come off or not. Unfortunately some of those really brave 50-50 plays that should have been turned over – when we were turning those over early in the game – we couldn’t turn them over (late). And some ‘luck’ plays just fell in the lap of their players.
“They’ll look at that and say, ‘that’s really good play’ and in a sense it is. But it could have easily gone the other way, which it has done at different stages with them. When they’ve played the good sides … when they try to take a punt to get back into the game and it goes the other way for them.
“But it’s good footy by them to give themselves a chance to get back into the contest. And that’s why they’ve won so many close games over the journey the last two to three years.”
The key when it comes to Collingwood is that ‘Russian Roulette football’, or ‘chaos football’, to put it through a family-friendly filter, is done entirely on their terms.
The Pies artificially create chaos in an environment where they know where everyone will be. An article in The Athletic where an analyst talks about Liverpool’s transition also fits Collingwood’s method to a tee:
“The biggest difference is that Liverpool know how to artificially create that chaos in a safe environment. Watch Trent (Alexander-Arnold) get the ball in a wider area … he plays an early cross and then Liverpool can counter-press on that. It’s a low-percentage pass. You’re not expecting to win it necessarily but you’re creating the second ball, you’re creating what’s essentially an artificial transition, and you’ve minimised the risk because you’ve dictated when it’s going to happen.”
It’s nearly exactly the same thing with Collingwood when they’re chasing the game. It’s chaotic to everyone else except the Pies, which is what sets them apart in these situations.
Take this passage of play leading to Beau McCreery’s goal as an example. It looks like it can go wrong any of about fifteen different ways and like Clarkson said, against the better teams it has more of a chance of doing so (albeit not that often overall, given they’re reigning premiers and all). But there are always Pies in aggressive positions and ready to be the next passage in the chain. It’s not a coincidence they all happen to be in the right place at the right time:
Or this end-to-end goal passage from North’s forward 50 to a Bobby Hill mark at the top of the square.
Steele Sidebottom’s wild handball ricochets off Daicos’ foot into Liam Shiels’ face and right into the lap of Crisp; one of those ‘luck plays’ Clarkson mentioned.
But watch again and look how Crisp gets himself in a perfect front and square crumbing position with support on each side and further runners wider.
Even then, if Will Hoskin-Elliott is caught next up in the chain it’s a near-guaranteed North goal to suck most of the air out the building.
But Pies are off to the races forward of the ball and when Hoskin-Elliott gets away from the immediate pressure there’s only going to be one result.
It’s another example of a play that looks like it could break down at any moment, but Collingwood get themselves in a position to impact if the ball bounces their way. It’s all you can ask for in their situation.
It’s tough to defend – particularly for a team at North’s stage – because the choices are more or less:
a) Keep your normal defensive and offensive settings and risk getting opened up
b) Adjust to their extra aggressiveness by sitting deeper, which invites pressure and removes offensive options
North didn’t have an answer but as it turned out, the answer was gifted to them through Collingwood taking the lead and shifting mindset.
For all of the Pies’ brilliance chasing a game, this season they have not been good protecting leads. They almost coughed up a big one against Hawthorn in Round 4, got out of jail late with a Kyle Langford miss on Anzac Day, had a stroke of luck against Adelaide in Round 10, and blew a 25-point edge in the dying stages against Fremantle.
So after North retook the lead through a Teakle major, there was one more chance to hold on. Which brings us to a theme of last week’s post. In the Eagles analysis, I wrote:
The first stage of learning how to win is learning how not to lose. In other words, learning to not beat yourself down the stretch of a game.
In my opinion, North ticked the box against West Coast. They didn’t against Collingwood, with the key moment happening at a kick in.
Broadcast captures some of the moment, but not all of it. Zac Fisher has the ball, with numbers gathering long down the line. 99.9 percent of the time in this situation that’s where the kick goes, and this should be no exception.
But Fisher has his mind set on hitting up Bailey Scott with a shorter, tougher pass. It’s fine if North are chasing the game, not in this case. Despite all the evidence further down the field showing Fisher to kick long, he goes short and misses the target.
Turnover, Collingwood inside 50, Hill mark, goal.
It’s a basic error that comes from a team without reps in this situation. Next time in this situation, Fisher goes long without a second thought and North probably reset for a boundary throw in close to centre wing.
From there, we know what happened with the manic finish and umpires forgetting basic rules of football, but in the bigger picture there is plenty to take out of the afternoon.
It feels like the next step of North’s progression. Which isn’t to say every week now brings genuine expectations, but with a solid half-season of data in the pocket there’s now an understanding of the best way forward with setups.
Melbourne at the MCG will be a different style of game again, and there’ll likely be a forced change with suspension for Kallan Dawson. But Griffin Logue’s AFL return is not too far away and after that things will shift again.
Suddenly there are almost too many things to monitor.