Saturday at Marvel Stadium was an absorbing tactical battle.
North Melbourne arrived with a clear plan to take away Sydney’s prime strengths and for long stretches the plan either worked or broke even.
North’s 67 inside 50s were the highest tally it had managed in a game since Round 12, 2019, and was also comfortably the highest tally against Sydney this year.
Part of the inflated number was based on how North chose to enter forward 50, looking to stop Sydney’s rebound that has sliced teams up time and time again this year.
Yet still, for all the good moments North had, it was impossible to keep Sydney down all afternoon. There were just enough passages where the Swans’ system and talent won out to condemn North to a frustrating loss against (arguably) the form team in the competition.
Today’s post will refrain from too many big picture takeaways and focus strictly on the back and forth from the game itself.
While the goal isn’t to simplify today’s post down to ‘Sydney handball and run good from back line, North please stop it’, it’s also where we have to start given what we’ve covered so far this year.
At the start of Round 9, Sydney led the league in:
– Scoring shots starting from their defensive half
– Goals starting from their defensive 50
– Fewest goals conceded from their rebound 50s (alternative title: they don’t get punished if they turn it over exiting defensive 50)
For North to have any chance they needed to ensure their forward entries remained threatening while also maintaining some semblance of defensive cover around and/or behind the ball.
So when the very first entry pinballed back out in record time like this, all sorts of alarm bells started ringing.
Then the second entry was a direct turnover walked up field by Sydney for a shot at goal. A few minutes later the Swans went end to end again, this time for a goal, and it was code red (and white) everywhere. It was what prompted this tweet:
Thankfully North soon settled in and the game reached the flow it would maintain for large portions of the afternoon.
Where North improved was blocking Sydney’s ability to cleanly exit from defensive 50. What the Swans do so well in their back end is have their attacking half backs ready to get the ball and go, knowing they have both defensive cover alongside them and midfielders already in offensive position.
Because Sydney are such a strong corridor side, this predictability in movement patterns allows a switch from defence to attack at the click of a finger. They constantly shrink the space opponents have to work in before forcing the turnover, which in turn gives them all the room in the world to rapidly move it up field.
It was up to North to change the balance, which they attempted to do by shifting the ball outside the shell Sydney look to defend in. When things were going to plan* it meant deeper and/or wider entries, putting the ball in a position where it would be hard for Sydney to easily rebound.
(*this is called foreshadowing)
For example, moments after this screenshot the ball goes deep into Darling’s pocket. Even if it was a direct turnover from the entry, it’d still be in a spot where North should be able to wall off one side of the ground and force Sydney long back down the line.
As it turned out, Darling marked and goaled anyway.
At times North’s entries were into high-risk areas that were probably too aggressive, but they were able to get away with it because of Sydney’s want to get in attacking positions as quickly as possible.
This Finn O’Sullivan goal comes because he’s able to wander in unchecked while some of Sydney’s midfielders are ball watching at the front of the pack instead of opponent watching:
The second half of the second quarter was North’s best passage of the game; offence and defence working hand in hand.
Earlier in the piece we went over how Sydney had the fewest goals conceded from their rebound 50s. North were able to flip that story around, kicking five goals direct from Sydney rebound 50 turnovers.
Two of those came in the second quarter, with the turnovers forced in different ways. If we play the turnovers one after the other, we can see:
1) North funnelling the Sydney rebound the direction wider after a deep forward entry, and
2) Even when it looked like Sydney had found the corridor, a strong set up behind the ball forcing Mills wide
It is clear progress because last year (or the year before, or the year before, or … you get the point) either clip gets marched down field more often than not with a minimum of fuss.
At half time North should have felt content with the general flow of the game, with the exception of kicking for goal. While normal caveats around game state apply when utilising expected score, on an average day North would have entered the rooms with roughly a 20-point lead. They missed a few and the Swans were seemingly physically unable to miss.
Then the third quarter saw much of the decisive moments to separate Sydney from North.
For all the positive moments North had throughout the day, against a team as good as Sydney there is next to no margin for error. They have the ability to turn half chances into full chances: Tom Papley goal side of Caleb Daniel at a forward 50 stoppage and Chad Warner swooping on a Cam Zurhaar handball for two goals in a minute.
Sydney’s next two goals demonstrated what happened when North’s forward entries strayed from the plan of attack.
When inside 50s are both central and relatively shallow – i.e. landing somewhere between 30-45 metres out – they have to be in a fashion where it’s both not a direct turnover and there is cover behind the entry.
North went zero for two, which gifted Sydney a field set up exactly how they would have dreamed. Unsurprisingly they used the room to go end to end and goal. Here are the entries, turnovers, and transitions back-to-back.
Shortly after we were treated to more umpiring inconsistency – just for something different on an afternoon where every whistle for both sides was a lottery – leading to a Heeney goal, and then a Jy Simpkin handball turnover doing the complete opposite of shifting the ball outside Sydney’s shell, instead going into the middle of it.
It was different moments here and there, coupled with forward 50 entries straying from the plan. Of North’s 17 inside 50s for the third quarter, 11 were direct turnovers. As we’ve gone over earlier, sometimes turnovers can be okay in small doses if the process behind the entries are sound. Instead during the third quarter Sydney took the ball from defensive 50 to forward 50 seven times, kicking two goals and ensuring North didn’t register a score from any of the Swans’ rebounds.
The above sounds like a description of a horrendous period, but in reality it’s more an illustration of how many things have to go right to beat a side of Sydney’s quality while North are still taking small steps forward of their own.
Because after all that, North were able to recalibrate and play the last quarter largely on their terms as well. Sydney were restricted to just 67 disposals for the term – their second lowest this year – and their only goal came from a passage that may or may not have started from a ball yorking the point post and being called out on the full, but definitely involved Angus Sheldrick running 20 metres without a bounce.
It was just the margin – small enough as it was – created by moments in the third quarter was just too far out of reach. It shouldn’t take away from another clear sign of progress. In the interim the nearly impossible to answer intangible is whether that progress without an ultimate reward is enough to keep fuelling consistent steps forward. It’s human nature to take a breath at some point and pause – just hopefully not at Adelaide Oval where North Melbourne’s record is approximately 0-218.