The good and the bad: Round 5, 2025 v Gold Coast

There are a lot of videos in today’s post. Like, a lot.

From seven points in front with seven minutes to go in the third quarter to losing by 52 wasn’t exactly what North Melbourne asked for against the suddenly all-conquering Gold Coast outfit.

North made changes to free up some of their ball use issues highlighted over previous weeks on the blog, and by and large they had the desired effect.

Unfortunately, there were also a multitude of mistakes when the ball hit the ground in North’s defensive half.

Those two topics are what today’s post focuses on, starting with the good and finishing with the bad.

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In addition to Patreon, you can find me on Twitter – and also Bluesky, where vibes are much more pleasant and there’s much less hate. It’s nice.

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The good: Ball use changes

Much of last week’s post was dedicated to how the offensive system was running North into trouble. A combination of short, slow kicking, and handballs not gaining any metres had opponents licking their lips.

The team reshuffle meant all of Caleb Daniel, Zac Fisher, and Finn O’Sullivan were in the back seven. Darcy Tucker moved to the wing alongside Dylan Stephens, all while Colby McKercher rotated between high half forward and the third winger.

Although there’s no publicly available stats on how often North moved the angles in possession, it was clear to the eye they’d changed from the previous fortnight. Often when talk is about moving the ball around, the default reaction is to think of a full ground switch.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Often it’s just subtle shifts on slight angles that move a defence around to create gaps. Take this passage of play for instance. McKercher takes it slightly off the line to find Stephens, who moves it again to Sheezel, who sees Parker running hard over the zone, which gives him room to find Larkey with a neat kick.

It’s not earth-shattering movement, but simple shifts with both width and length to find results.

There was also a willingness to kick it long more than previous weeks. Not a complete 180 in mentality, but enough to have a more even balance between short and long. Again, to be clear, there’s no singular way to look at short v long. This is only to say North on Saturday were more even between the two compared with recent outings.

Although this passage ends in a behind, the willingness to run from behind and go long to a contest was something rarely seen in the losses against Adelaide and Sydney.

Although simple scoring shots aren’t the be all and end all measure, North’s 24 shots were more than each of the Suns’ first three opponents…

Scoring shots v Gold Coast in 2025
West Coast, Round 1: 14
Melbourne, Round 2: 22
Adelaide, Round 4: 20
North Melbourne, Round 5: 24

…and coming from 47 entries, scoring from more than half those inside 50s is a more than respectable effort. Especially against a Suns defence that prides itself on playing a front half game and has been executing it well to date.

So while the final score – and the last quarter and a half in particular – will leave many flat, it wasn’t a bleak situation like the game against Sydney. There were improvements in some areas.

The issue is how the negatives outweighed those improvements on the day…

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For those who have missed it, the last five posts on The Shinboner, plus…

2025’s Team Structures Page, now updated!
Minutes played by age: Round 4’s Notebook
North Melbourne’s Round 4 analysis v Sydney
Method shifts: Round 3’s Notebook
North Melbourne’s Round 3 analysis v Adelaide
Trend checking: Round 2’s Notebook

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The bad: Panic attacks down back

Normally when a team concedes 11 goals from defensive half, the reaction is to blame a team’s front half defence; ‘they let them get out too easily’, and so on.

In this case Gold Coast didn’t exit North’s forward half with any sort of game changing speed or innovation, most of the time anyway. It was largely a very simple long kick, straight line plan, getting numbers around the fall and gaining territory that way.

For example, look at the Suns’ possession chart during the first quarter – a term where five of their six goals started from defensive half:

Nothing spectacular, mainly straight lines, and it all paid off for the Suns because once the ball hit the ground it was a five-alarm fire for North.

Through the early stages of 2025, we’ve alternated between talking about system errors and individual errors. Saturday in the back half, to my eye at least, was heavily slanted towards the latter.

Whether it was in open play, or from stoppages as the game dragged on, so much of it was just individual mistakes.

I hope we’re all ready, because here we go:

Goal 1: Charlie Comben is a touch slow getting back into defensive mode, so Daniel decides to tag over to Ethan Read, leaving Ben Ainsworth free as a bird as midfielders try to scramble back and cover:

Goal 2: Griffin Logue decides to leave his opponent to press up, which is a basic defensive principle, but only when you can impact the play. In this case he doesn’t, which creates a domino effect.

Goal 3: From a slow, long, straight ball, Ben Long is allowed to have prime position front and centre. He gathers the crumb and kicks forward where Aidan Corr gives away the free.

Goal 4: Long turns Daniel around too easily, allowing him to be in prime position to gather and snap.

Goal 5: Comben leaves Ben King to get to the contest and spoil Read, which he does … but doesn’t kill the ball. It allows Suns to crumb and pop it over the top for an easy goal. (Extra note: The broadcast cameras make it hard to see whose responsibility Bailey Humphrey was)

Goal 8: I am 99 percent convinced there’s a breakdown here that led to Jake Rogers threading the handball to Sam Flanders, but broadcast cameras don’t show the full story, so no one deserves to be highlighted.

Goal 10: Flanders is able to swing past Finn O’Sullivan to get inside position and then break Logue’s tackle, creating an easy overlap over the top for King to goal.

Goal 11: Jy Simpkin is a second slow to react to Noah Anderson’s movement which opens up the rest of the play to Jeffrey’s goal.

Goal 12: I’d be willing to bet money something happened while Rogers was keeping it in on the boundary against Luke Parker, but broadcast vision only shows the aftermath so there’s no ability to illustrate.

Goal 13: Fisher stays at the back of the pack, which is perfectly fine. But then he doesn’t come up to take any Sun, allowing Lachie Weller to find a pocket of space to roll through and goal.

Goal 14: Everyone is ball watching until it’s too late. In the defensive 50. No wonder Matt Rowell is able to goal.

Goal 15: A rare system error instead of an individual error, collectively overcommitting to the ball carrier instead of keeping shape.

Goal 16: In addition to Hardeman missing the tackle, no one follows Noble at all.

Goal 17: Fisher doesn’t track Flanders at all, giving him prime ground level position. To be fair, it’s a very good finish from Flanders.

Goal 20: If the cameras stayed wider, we could see how Nick Holman found so much room. Given the passage was relatively open, likelihood is it was an individual mistake, but we can’t tell for sure.

And that brings us to the end of the goal-by-goal audit. It was pretty grim!

Part of these errors can be attributed to the hot conditions – it brings fatigue on earlier than usual, leading to more mental mistakes along with the physical.

There will always be some mistakes like this from week to week. Expecting any team to consistently be perfect in this area is unrealistic, given the pressure on at all times…

However. To have this many mistakes speaks to internal standards. Not internal as in among the club, but internal as in answering to yourself. Some people want to play well to make themselves look good; others want to do it to help their teammates.

Either one is fine, but whichever one it is, it just has to be better. Sometimes there are system issues like we discussed last week. For this section, this week, sometimes the adjustment is just to carry out the basics better. Most of these errors are things we shouldn’t be seeing.