For most of his tenure at North Melbourne, Alastair Clarkson’s eyebrows have been arched in a kind of perma-frown. The bigger the deficit, the steeper the arch.
It’s not as though his team has been completely hopeless. Most of the time, they’ve tried their guts out. They’ve just been incredibly frustrating. They’d won 11 games in three years heading into the weekend’s clash against Port Adelaide. They were 11-1-57 since Clarkson took over. In press conferences, he preaches patience, the long haul, the future. But it’s the eyebrows that keep the score – two hairy registers of shanks, turnovers and towellings.
There was a three-minute patch at the end of the first half of Sunday’s 17.11 (113) to 9.13 (67) win where the eyebrows flatlined and the Roos finally looked like a serious footy team. It netted three goals and was a snapshot of where and why there is ground for optimism – the blunt instrument of Tristan Xerri, the propulsion of Luke Davies-Uniacke, the quick and clean hands of Harry Sheezel, and the continual improvement of their crop of young, high draftees. The onslaught continued after the main break, with three more goals in 10 minutes, at which point the result was forgone.
It was by no means the marquee game of a rather dubiously cherrypicked round of “rivalry” matches. But it was crucial that North showed something. Earlier in the week the club president, Dr Sonja Hood, wrote a letter to North Melbourne members. It may as well have been addressed to Clarkson.
“The message to the entire playing group this year is simple,” Hood wrote. “The ‘potential’ phase is over. We aren’t looking for brief flashes any more. We are looking for a standard that honours the emotional and financial investment that our members and supporters make every single year.”
Any of those members heading to the game via tram or train could have read extensive interviews with the North coach in both the Herald Sun and the Age. We learned that Clarkson has taken up beekeeping. We learned that in the week the Hawthorn racism scandal broke, then AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan said to him, “Just talk to Dills [Andrew Dillon, AFL general counsel at the time] and all this will be resolved” – a neat encapsulation of how the AFL do business.
And he told journalist Jake Niall: “If they think someone else can be out there, [and] they’re going to do it quicker, I’m all for it.”
The streetfighter who yields to no one was noticeably absent in both interviews. He sounded like a man who had mellowed, a man at peace with his bees and the realities of building a list from scratch.
But Sunday was the first proper glimpse of the team he has been assuring us is ready to emerge. They’ve always had talent and spirit but at Marvel Stadium they demonstrated that they may finally be a team with a coherent system, a team that can defend, a team that can live up to what the president demands in letter form. The next five games are against West Coast, Essendon, Carlton, Brisbane and Richmond. They’d consider themselves a chance in at least four of those, and the way Brisbane’s going they’d be half a chance in that one as well.
The best football of round one came on Saturday, when seven of the leading nine teams of 2025 were scheduled to play and when, by the usual stroke of genius, there was no footy on free-to-air television. In particular, Sydney’s opening quarter was the equal of their third term the previous week, and superior to any other quarter from any other side so far this year.
In method and in application, their game against Brisbane at the Gabba in August last year was instructive. Errol Gulden notched up his usual 30 or so touches that day, most of them perfectly weighted and incisive. He was the key to their vast improvement in the final third of the 2025 season. They operated at a totally different tempo to how they’d played up until that point under Dean Cox, and for much of the John Longmire era. It was bolder and more ballistic, and it was all on display at the SCG again on Saturday night.
But they’d trade that win for a fit and available Gulden, whose shoulder was yanked out of its socket. He was coming off the best pre-season of his life, was in slashing form in all the scratch matches, completely obliterated Carlton to kick off the season and backed it up against the reigning premiers on Saturday.
Gulden is training to be a pilot. He has the spatial awareness, the even temperament and the precision I want in my airmen. “You just can’t think about footy when you’re up in a plane – otherwise you’d be in a bit of strife,” he told AFL.com’s Cal Twomey. But he might be in a bit of strife now. And presumably he won’t be practising take-offs or lacing out full forwards for a while.
