The lack of improvement at North Melbourne is a big issue, according to Kane Cornes.
The Kangaroos were belted by 57 points by Adelaide in Hobart on Saturday to slump to a 0-7 start to the 2024 season.
Coach Alastair Clarkson said his club was in a “very similar boat” to the Crows side of two or three years ago regarding their evolution.
However, Cornes doesn’t agree with that as the Crows under Matthew Nicks are at least showing a trajectory by winning more games each season.
Another factor is that the average age of the Crows on the weekend was 24yr 8mth and average games was 74.2, while the Roos were 23yr 4mth and 62.7 games, which isn’t an enormous gap.
Throw in a disastrous 45-point defeat to Hawthorn last weekend and it’s been a tough start at Arden Street.
“We saw what Hawthorn did to them last week, and this is Hawthorn who have won one game of footy,” Cornes said on SEN Breakfast.
“He’s talking about comparing his team against sides coming up that are in a similar position. Not that they’re as young, Adelaide, but not they’re not old. They’re one of the youngest teams and they’ve destroyed them.
“So has he got his game plan wrong for where this group is at and is it the wrong way around? Should it be more defensive now rather than the ‘Northball’ rubbish that we saw and heard?”
Breakfast co-host Nathan Buckley does rate the inexperienced players at North, but identifies that as a problem because they are so talented yet need more help around them.
“I think the issue for North and their fans out there is your most talented players are the most young and inexperienced,” said Buckley.
“So you’re going to get fluctuations in performance.
“If you took four or five of North’s most talented young players and put them in at GWS or Geelong or Sydney, they would be two, three, four times the players that they look at the moment.”
It prompted a back and forth between Cornes and Buckley who are both somewhat worried about the plight of the Roos in the wake of the Clarkson arrival prior to the 2023 season.
They have been enveloped in positivity given their talented youth yet have not delivered on any of the promise.
Cornes feels it is a Clarkson issue, while Buckley is not putting as much blame on the coach but does concede – “The messiah coaching idea is a fallacy”.
Cornes: “So what’s the way out?
“North fans don’t want to hear patience, they don’t want to hear references to Adelaide because their progression is there that you can see. There’s no progression, there’s no improvement from a win-loss perspective at North.
“So when he (Clarkson) speaks about other teams and comparing them, you could actually see that they were improving year on year.
“There isn’t any of that improvement. I get the feeling North fans are getting sick of being told to be patient.”
Buckley: “I think that there’s going to be a lot more pain.”
Cornes: “They thought Clarkson was the guy to actually put them in a position to improve year on year, and he hasn’t.”
Buckley: “Let’s rip the band-aid off – it’s not just the coach.
“The messiah coaching idea is a fallacy.”
Cornes: “So they sold that (message) wrong.
“The talk about, ‘No, we didn’t need a Plan B because we had Alastair Clarkson’, and the positivity around that was the wrong message to send. It should have been more of a whole-club approach rather than paying one coach the figure that he is on which means he doesn’t get the support around him that other clubs have.
“There would be more of a balanced distribution across the soft cap. When you pay the coach that much, it doesn’t leave a lot for everyone else.”
The Roos find themselves as the only winless club in 2024 with the league’s worst percentage of 57.3.
They’ll continue the hunt for the first triumph of the season when they meet St Kilda at Marvel Stadium on Saturday.
