North Melbourne coach Alastair Clarkson has accepted humbling criticism of his side’s training standards, admitting it has cost the struggling side wins this season.
The Kangaroos are the AFL’s only winless team after seven rounds, with Herald Sun columnist Mick McGuane last week suggesting North players had poor training standards which were“poles apart” from their peers at other clubs.
In a video to members posted on the Kangaroos’ website on Wednesday afternoon, Clarkson directly and candidly addresed the column, admitting “Mick’s probably right.”
“The standards of our group are not at the level they need to be. That’s what we’re aspiring to do, that’s why we brought in new players, new coaches, to try and resurrect that,” he said in a North Melbourne members’ Q&A session.
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“We embarked on this pathway of investing in youth, acknowledging that was going to come with some bumpy roads on that path and part of it will be lifting our standards.
“If we were training unbelievably well, I think that would be reflected in winning games of football on the weekend.
“It doesn’t surprise me one little bit that someone who came and observed training would say, ‘I don’t think the standards are good enough’, because that’s why we’re sitting in the position on the ladder that we are right now.
“Our challenge right now is how can we lift those standard”
Clarkson, however, isn’t hitting the panic button and said on Thursday talk of the Kangaroos’ permament demise is predictable and simply “happens in the game” to the club sitting at the bottom of the AFL ladder.
Clarkson brushed aside former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire’s comments that other club officials wanted the Kangaroos to be removed from the AFL to make way for the new Tasmanian side.
McGuire on Nine’s Eddie and Jimmy podcast this week said the removal of a small Victorian club like North Melbourne was the “easy solution” to keep the competition at 18 teams after Tasmania’s inclusion.
“Non-Victorian presidents, and some Victorian presidents, don’t want to have 19 teams,” he said.
“There’s an easy solution for this. One will go. If you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing in this game.”
Clarkson said rhetoric similar to McGuire’s had been used over Gold Coast’s future in the AFL and would likely follow the next club to drop to the foot of the ladder.
“They doubted the future of Gold Coast a couple of years ago, and all of a sudden that’s corrected itself,” he said.
“My son was laughing last night, saying ‘13 years ago Dad, the first quarter of the Essendon-Gold Coast game was 94 to 1’.
“It just happens in the game. We’ll evolve and get past this, but guess what we won’t get past? If North Melbourne do improve, which we hope to do, there’ll be someone else on the bottom of the ladder in two or three years’ time and the blowtorch will be on them.”
Clarkson said the Roos were “actually really profitable” off the field and would only grow further with the revitalisation of the Arden Street precinct over the next 10 to 15 years.
“From what I can gather, every team in the competition has been where we are,” he said.
“It’s just par for the course – this club’s blue collar, it’s survived a hell of a lot more traumatic events than what’s going on at the moment.
“There’s some exciting urban development that’s going to happen around here that will change the whole fabric of this area.”
Clarkson said his winless side was bracing for further inconsistency in its contested ball game as he continued to stick with talented youth over more experienced options in the midfield.
It comes as senior on-ballers Luke Davies-Uniacke and Jy Simpkin head into Sunday’s clash against St Kilda under injury clouds after both sustained knocks against Adelaide in Hobart.
“They’ve trained most of the session, they’ve got little niggles which are common for players as they try to prepare from one game to the next,” Clarkson said.
“They did as much as we needed them to do today, they’ll train again (Friday) fully and hopefully they’ll be right to go against the Saints.
“They do need to tick one more box probably, if they pull up well from today’s session … both of them have just more or less been knocks, I think they’re OK but will wait and see tomorrow.”
