North Melbourne coach Alastair Clarkson has declared his team's season "still alive" after they made it through a gruelling seven-game stretch with two wins and their pants back on.
North rebounded from their 124-point loss to Fremantle in Bunbury with a thrilling one-point victory over West Coast in Perth on Saturday night.
Both of those matches were technically Kangaroos home games after the cash-strapped club sold them to the West Australian government under a lucrative three-year agreement.
It capped a torrid travel schedule for the Roos, who in their past seven matches have taken on GWS, Geelong, Adelaide, Fremantle and West Coast outside of Melbourne, as well as home matches against Gold Coast and Sydney.
North Melbourne only beat the Suns and Eagles during that stretch, but at 6-7 they are still well and truly in the hunt for a Wildcard berth.
"Our season's still alive," Clarkson said.
"We know that there's a lot of hard work ahead of us. Our last six weeks have been a really, really tough six weeks.
"We will cop the criticism and fairly so for our performance (against Fremantle), but I don't think anyone in the competition had us winning too many of those six games when they saw the draw at the start of the year.
"We had Geelong in Geelong, Adelaide in Adelaide, GWS in Canberra, Fremantle at Bunbury and West Coast (in Perth). That's a tough six-week period and we've come through with a couple of wins.
"Hardly convincing wins, but if we add them up to the four that we got earlier in the year, then we go into the back half of the year with some sort of confidence that we'll improve on our on our ladder position and our performances from last year."
Clarkson said it had been a torrid week trying to recover from their embarrassing loss to the Dockers, in which the Kangaroos conceded the last 19 goals of the match.
Sheezel sells a bit of candy and snaps a beauty from the pocket 🍬 pic.twitter.com/eXoxODadhu
— AFL (@AFL) June 13, 2026
But he was much happier with his team's contested work against West Coast after watching North win the contested ball battle 120-116.
"It's hard as a coaching group and a playing group to try to put a finger on what happened in our preparation for the Fremantle game, but we just weren't there," Clarkson said.
"We were certainly much better (against West Coast), but we've still got a long way to go to be consistent in that space and we are going to be getting to work on that.
"It's always a key focus for your side, but when you have your pants pulled down like we did last week, you need to make sure that you're really strong in that space and we were better."
