Repeating the cycle: Round 20, 2025 v Geelong

North Melbourne’s final losing margin of 101 points at Marvel Stadium was entirely dictated by Geelong, the Cats treating North like a state league side from start to finish.

The individual game trends are largely irrelevant, but what’s extremely relevant is how the night fit into the bigger picture story of North’s season.

Those who have read these pieces each week, or even most weeks, will understand how both North’s issues, and the little positive glimpses, have been following the same cycle.

It’s what today’s post will be about…

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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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Zoom out and North’s general game style has followed a similar trend in each of the last two seasons. What follows is a top-line summary.

The year(s) have started with a focus on team offence, looking to expand the field and hit the scoreboard regularly. As a consequence, the team defence suffered, through any of multiple reasons depending on the moment:

– The ball use not being good enough, exposing the defence
– The defensive structure not holding up under pressure
– The individual defenders not being good enough under pressure

Then after a reset at some point in the season – mid-season in 2024, a little earlier this year – there’s been a renewed focus on contest, pressure, and general defending. It’s been executed in a few different ways:

– Using possession more to protect the team rather than to threaten opposition
– Committing more resources around contests to keep the ball in dispute/out of transition for longer
– Picking and choosing moments to attack rather than a full-blooded offensive commitment

Those tweaks have led to improvements in both 2024 and 2025. It was laid out in the weekly posts last year, while this year, both post-Carlton pieces are the best summary of the lows and (relative) highs.

It’s important to lay all the above out like so, because it provides context for the third stage of both years. The roadblock, brick wall, or whatever description you’d like to use that North keep running into.

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For those who have missed it, the last five North Melbourne match analysis pieces on The Shinboner, plus…

The 2025 Team Structures Page
North Melbourne’s Round 19 analysis v Sydney
North Melbourne’s Round 18 analysis v Melbourne
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

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Those improvements – scaling back the offence, focusing more on contest, keeping the ball in tight rather than expanding the ground – aren’t a long-term sustainable method. As a first step, it’s a useful starting point. But if a team keeps doubling down on those areas of focus as the core of their style, they end up like Carlton.

So there was a recognition that once it felt like improvements had come with some of the fundamentals…

Round 7-15, 2025
– 3 wins, 1 draw, 4 losses
– 93.8%
– +69 contested possession differential
– +70 clearance differential
– Improved defence after turnovers

…the offence would start to open up a little bit, attempting to build a more sustainable, well-rounded brand.

And promptly, everything fell apart again. Like clockwork. If we pick it up following the Carlton win in Round 15, the Hawthorn loss in Round 16 was more due to their midfield playing exceptionally well rather than North rolling out the red carpet.

But three of the next four games – Bulldogs, Sydney, Geelong – have seen large swathes dictated by how North have used the ball, with the team defence simultaneously falling apart.

The minute North look to become more expansive with the ball, the structural improvements dissipate. Part of this year’s issues have come due to Charlie Comben’s absence down back, the defensive anchor only starting one of the last five games at that end.

More on him in the last section, but in general, these recent games have seen a return to the three issues listed earlier:

– The ball use not being good enough, exposing the defence
– The defensive structure not holding up under pressure
– The individual defenders not being good enough under pressure

Then because of those three main issues, more pop up as a consequence:

– Inconsistent decision making due to the extra offensive focus, which in turn…
– Throws positioning out of balance all over the field, and…
– Allows opponents to dictate exactly how the game will be played

In these situations it’s like the three lines in North’s team – defence, midfield, forward – are three separate teams, because there’s minimal visible talk or communication of how they’re all supposed to be working in tandem.

There were so many moments on Saturday night where the issues were brutally exposed by a Geelong side properly switched on for the first three quarters. Those issues all flow into one another.

For instance, if we start when North were in possession, they’d largely look to move short, either with kicks or run and carry. The issue was Geelong were sweating on anything short, dedicating their resources there and compressing the game.

It made things much easier for the Cats to defend, knowing that even though North were looking to add more speed – sometimes – to their ball use compared to other points of the season, it was still almost exclusively short. It’s the whole point of a team defence: make the ground as small as possible.

Then when the turnovers happened and Geelong gained possession, North’s defenders and those behind the ball would look to push up the ground, trying to squeeze the game.

But Geelong’s possession was comfortable, and every time they had it their goal was to stretch the field at every possible opportunity, knowing North’s defence around the ball wasn’t good enough to slow the Cats down.

It led to a string of passages where there were multiple Cats wide open inside forward 50, metres and metres goal side of their North opponents, probably wondering why they were defending so high up the ground as the ball bounced back over their head.

It looked for all the world like North’s three lines of players playing three different games. Which is what has happened in their worst moments over the last couple of years, traditionally after passages where the offence has broken down or the game is open.

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

The 2025 Team Structures Page
Brisbane testing tweaks, a crack in Collingwood’s midfield: Round 18’s Notebook
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

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In these cycles, the last stage is North looking bereft of any answers. Offensively, defensively, everyone ends up running around to save themselves.

The two players who deserve a special shoutout are Comben and Zac Banch.

Banch, in his second game, was one of the few players who kept on presenting offensively and finding nominally dangerous areas. For Geelong’s defence to realise this and use him as a reference point for bait is why we saw some of the turnovers when the ball was in Banch’s vicinity.

It’s both a credit to Banch’s movement, and a large issue from a team setup point of view, seeing a 173-centimetre second gamer – on his starting 22 debut – continually finding himself as the outlet, time and time again.

Comben, starting forward in the absence of Nick Larkey*, but getting frostbite while Jeremy Cameron did as he pleased down the other end, was moved back late in the third quarter.

He then had five intercept marks in a little more than 30 minutes, throwing his battered body around like it was the last quarter of a Grand Final. If those minutes were played at even 75 percent speed, it would have been perfectly understandable, still better than the remainder of North’s backs, and also making everyone around him better for the intangibles and notable leadership he brings.

(*I also thought it may have been some sort of shoulder protection given he’s clearly playing half-fit at best)

While singling those two players out isn’t meant to punch down on the remaining 21, it was also a clear illustration of this cycle North find themselves stuck in. It shouldn’t be so noticeable to see two players standing out with individual efforts while the whole system around them falls into pieces at the slightest hint of a change.

For all of that though, the question everything comes down to is this:

How can North get past this brick wall they keep running in to?

In last week’s post there was a mention of needing to find some sort of fix to the offensive issues. What that answer is, I don’t know.

Anyone watching closely and not looking for hot takes can see what North are trying to do at various times. On paper it makes sense with these gears looking to add in over time. It just keeps running into the same handful of issues time and again, offensively and defensively. Everything then collapses and the result is performances not up to AFL standard, before it builds slightly back up again.

There’s only so many times the cycle of ‘start expansively, everything fails, scale it back, see relative improvements, try to expand again, everything fails’ can be seen. It has to break somehow, someway.

Whether it’s personnel on-field, a circuit breaker with selection, or something left-field entirely, finding the solution is why coaches get paid the big (head coaches) to medium or low (assistant and development coaches) bucks.

Because at this stage, it’s Groundhog Day. But it’s not a movie, it’s real life. And it’s not a fun rom-com, but instead games and years getting ticked off the career card for no tangible reward.