That title might take you to strange corners of the internet if you’re braver than me and wish to Google, but nevertheless it’s the only way to sum up North Melbourne’s loss on Sunday.
Even allowing for North’s key absences – Nick Larkey, Luke Davies-Uniacke, Luke McDonald, and George Wardlaw, among others – the general concept entering a game is to give yourself as many opportunities to win as possible.
Especially for a team in North’s position, the goal should always be to broaden horizons if applicable in the situation. Melbourne, a team who had lost five in a row coming in, was one of those applicable situations.
Instead, North came in with a selected team that dictated nearly the entire flow of the first two and a half quarters, largely for the worse.
While there’s a whole other post in what happened to the game flow in the last quarter and a half after North made their substitute – taking Finnbar Maley off, placing Bailey Scott on the wing, Finn O’Sullivan to half back and shifting Wil Dawson forward – today’s topic is a sole focus on team selection, the influence it had, and the lessons that should be learned.
Otherwise I’d be writing until Wednesday.
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The Patreon is up and running once again for 2025, which you can find right here. The three tiers are much the same as previous years, with refined features for the top two.
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, even though there’s not a large AFL community yet.
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Four tall defenders against a Melbourne team that hasn’t played more than two tall forwards since Round 2, with none of their rotating cast of key forwards since then able to consistently hit the scoreboard, was a surprising move when teams were finalised on Friday.
Despite every available piece of evidence pointing to North lining up as selected, I was holding out hope one of those four talls would head forward at the first siren on Sunday. Alas, there was no such luck, and the terms of engagement were immediately set.
Four tall defenders limited North’s options in two fairly important ways:
1) Their options to attack
2) Their options to defend
Those two issues weren’t mutually exclusive: point 1 fed into point 2, which fed back into point 1 in a never-ending loop.
Let’s start with attacking options. With four tall defenders patrolling the back half, a couple with less than suitable matchups, there was always a worry of what would happen when the ball hit the ground. Bayley Fritsch’s early goal, running onto a bouncing ball with no one able to get close to him, was a prime example.
It meant there was a level of caution when North had the ball, understanding they’d be less likely to defend turnovers if Melbourne gained possession and decided to play a ground game and/or try to use open space* to their benefit.
(Which, to be fair, Melbourne haven’t always tried to do. ‘Using open space’ might be a phrase they memory hole depending on the week. But rarely is it presented in such an obvious fashion as Sunday.)
There were two available ways for North to try and stop that, knowing their personnel behind the ball would struggle to consistently achieve it:
1) Control the ball so Melbourne don’t have the option to use space
2) Dominate the clearance battle to unlock a territory game
Funnily enough, the first quarter almost couldn’t have gone any better in both respects. North were +33 for uncontested possessions, the highest differential* in any term of Round 18 by a distance, and also +6 for clearances.
(*For those wondering about second place, St Kilda’s +24 v Sydney in Q4 at Marvel Stadium on Sunday)
And yet for all the good work, North only had a five-point quarter-time lead. Each of the three goals they conceded spoke to the inherent limitations of their setup and the non-existent margin for error.
There was the Fritsch goal mentioned above for Melbourne’s second of the term, while one aggressive kick into the centre of the ground was swept away to the wing and put inside 50 to Jake Melksham with all the ease of a training run for Melbourne’s third.
The first of the lot though, Kozzy Pickett’s one-on-one win against Will Phillips deep in attack, spoke to how North’s selected side made Melbourne’s options blindingly obvious.
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For those who have missed it, the last five North Melbourne pieces on The Shinboner, plus…
2025’s Team Structures Page
North Melbourne’s Round 17 analysis v Western Bulldogs
North Melbourne’s Round 16 analysis v Hawthorn
North Melbourne’s Round 15 analysis v Carlton
North Melbourne’s Round 14 analysis v Fremantle
North Melbourne’s Round 13 analysis v West Coast
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Usually when a player starts in the midfield then floats forward – Pickett is one, Izak Rankine another at times, as a couple of examples – there’s an organised handover. Because in a mid-forward, high-damage role, the midfield rotation is often filled by a half-forward coming up to replace the man moving forward.
So in theory, after Will Phillips’ role on Pickett was completed around contests, he’d normally hand over Pickett to a North defender. Instead, Phillips was asked to follow Pickett everywhere, finding himself as the deepest defender over and over again. It was probably for one of two main reasons, with the answer unlikely to come out externally:
1) It was the matchup North wanted around the ground
2) There was no one in the back seven North trusted on Pickett
(Possible third candidate: North wanted to stick with their base matchups on Melbourne’s forwards as much as possible)
None of those options are particularly appealing, for different reasons, but in sticking with Phillips on Pickett around the ground it pulled North’s midfield structure all out of balance. Once the Demons realised what was happening, they were able to manipulate it to their advantage. Damien Hardwick actually mentioned it post-game on Friday night:
“The thing with tagging is, you can manipulate. It’s a really challenging space because … you can dictate that. We had a similar sort of things with Melbourne trying to tag Noah Anderson two weeks ago. They had to drop it at quarter time because you can sit there and flick things around.”
So as Pickett went to play as deep forward as possible, Melbourne used it to their advantage by:
1) Removing a first-string on-baller for the day from North’s around the ground work
2) Sometimes taking any of their half forwards up to the contest and dragging any North defender out of position, creating a situation where…
3) Two North players were out of their planned roles, while two Dees had significant advantages
The first 15 or so minutes of the second quarter was like Groundhog Day. With Melbourne figuring out how to use contests to their advantage and an advantage ahead of the ball, the game should have broken open well before North kicked a string of late behinds.
Jacob van Rooyen missed a fairly standard attempt while Pickett missed one soda and put another gettable chance out on the full, all stemming from how Melbourne were positionally moving and putting pressure on North’s setups, either around the ball at contests or on the back six.
The whole point of explaining the above is North already had few options at their disposal to counter it – but voluntarily gave themselves fewer.
A short-handed midfield allowed Melbourne to control the terms around contests, and a different back seven to usual dictated North’s offence and wasn’t equipped to deal with Melbourne’s moves.
If availability was better, on another day it would have been as easy* as handing Pickett over to McDonald or Jackson Archer and maintaining preferred midfield setups. Without that, it was about giving themselves as many possible options to thwart Melbourne’s strengths.
(*easy as in handing over, not easy as in keeping Pickett quiet)
For instance, even with the four talls, it could have been something like allowing Melbourne to have one of their half forwards go up as an extra around contests while North’s extra sat behind the ball as an interceptor.
We saw the reverse of that last week against the Bulldogs, as mentioned in the analysis post, and we know Melbourne aren’t the most dynamic of ball movement sides when forced to problem solve anything past a beginner’s level.
Or it could have been trusting any of the existing small defenders and shifting responsibilities around. Of course the obvious adjustment would have been to not play four tall defenders in the first place and go with any of the handful of realistic alternative options with the starting 22, but instead Melbourne were allowed to dictate what they wanted.
These options are all discussed at every club, every week, when game planning. Which is what made it so strange to see the lowest percentage option taken on Sunday at the MCG.
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For those who have missed it, the last five Notebook entries on The Shinboner, plus…
The 2025 Team Structures Page
Essendon’s changes, Adelaide in the air: Round 17’s Notebook
Brisbane, Essendon, Geelong, GWS health checks: Round 16’s Notebook
Adelaide, Hawthorn, Melbourne, West Coast health checks: Round 15’s Notebook
Collingwood, Gold Coast, Richmond, Sydney health checks: Round 14’s Notebook
St Kilda and Fremantle’s health checks: Round 13’s Notebook
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Without a handful of key players, North were always going to find it more difficult than normal. But the personnel choices increased the difficulty.
Over on the Team Structures page, exclusive for those on the $10 Patreon tier, we can see how often every team has opted to roll with four genuine key defenders.
No one else has done it this year, so it’s not as if there’s a new meta North managed to unlock ahead of the league by doing it twice.
The first time was against Sydney in Round 4, and while it wasn’t an ideal situation, it was easy to see the theory behind it on the night. The Swans were playing three key forwards – Amartey, McLean, and Ladhams – while Hayward is also strong aerially. If the theory behind a decision makes sense, but the execution is off, it’s a different story.
For this Melbourne loss, the situation was different given what the Demons presented. Long term, the game shouldn’t mean too much because the decisions made should fairly obviously be seen as mistakes and immediately rectified. And that’s fine, mistakes happen all the time.
The issue here is how the process came together to make this selection decision, and whether it can be fine tuned to make sure similar decisions don’t happen again. Because North Melbourne aren’t in a position where they can willingly handcuff themselves and get away with it.