Misfiring mids and forwards are the cause of North's form slump

If, as the saying often goes, bad kicking for goal is bad footy, then North Melbourne’s 10.17.77 to 16.9.105 loss to Port Adelaide on Saturday was up there with the worst football I’ve seen played.

Regular readers of my writings here on The Roar will know that as a rusted-on North Melbourne member (five years and counting) I’m not the type to pot my own team without good reason. If anything, I do pretty much the opposite, more than happy to pump them up or leap to their defense when the call is made.

But many North fans including myself have been left searching for answers as to how a season that showed so much promise at 9-0 has collapsed to this horrible, bitter 10-6.

The surface analysis seen across much of the media is that 9-0 North were simply not that good, the beneficiaries of an easy fixture, and the team has been shown up by the increase in difficulty.

While there’s no doubt that a tougher fixture has contributed to North’s slump, I don’t believe this goes deep enough. It’s not easy to get to 9-0, even if you do have an easy fixture – look at the way Sydney, Geelong and GWS have tossed away games to low-ranked opponents for proof. The North we saw in the first five or six rounds of this season at least was a good team, like it or not.

What is it that made them so? The Roos have two real advantages over the rest of the competition in my view, two aspects of the game where they can win matches when making good use of them.

The first is that they have Todd Goldstein, one of the best rucks in the game, who can go toe to toe with and beat just about any other ruck in the comp, except maybe those few others at the very top. His tap work provides North’s midfield with the edge they need to win the clearance battle, particularly the centre clearances.

The second is that they have forward line with a great depth and spread of talent, across a versatile variety of player types. Earlier in the season, I would’ve ranked it as the second or third best forward line in the league – behind the Crows, and about on par with no-Roughead Hawthorn.

Aside from these two aspects, the team is fairly standard. The defense is decent but like all defenses relies a lot on the midfield to protect it, and the midfield itself is made up of solid citizens without having a bonafide Ablett/Dangerfield/Pendlebury/Fyfe-esque superstar.

Both of these aspects of North’s game, however, have fallen away dramatically from the earlier part of the season. The stats show it quite well.

Goldstein has had some much-publicised injury woes this year, only once enough to take him off the field but enough to prevent his good work around the ground from being as prominent this season. However despite this, he has continued to rack up the hit-out numbers throughout the year.

What has changed in particular is North’s ability to win a centre clearance from Goldstein’s hit-outs. From Rounds 1-7, they had five games out of seven where they were winning at least 0.4 centre clearances per Goldstein hit out, or more. From Round 8 onwards, they have not hit that mark again even once in eight games.

They key reasons for this are Goldstein’s inability to impact the clearances himself as often as he has in the past once the hit-out work is done, as well as the absence of Daniel Wells for a significant stretch inside this period. Ben Cunnington has been a little below his usual efforts at times as well.

It’s a simple equation really – less centre clearances, more work needed to get the ball forward and set up a scoring opportunity. It’s important to North’s gameplan, it’s important to every team’s gameplan.

The forward line situation is more troubling. Early in the year, I felt that given the strength of North’s forward six, the Roos really only needed to have the upper hand in the game for 30-40 per cent of the match to kick a winning score. They could afford to split or even lose the battle in the middle of the ground because they could do more with less.

That is certainly no longer the case, and again the numbers show it pretty clearly. From Rounds 1-9, North had at least 0.4 scoring shots per inside 50 in eight of nine games. In the time since then, they have done so in just three out of seven.

What’s the cause here? There are a number of factors no doubt but probably the biggest one is that North’s forward stocks, in particular, have been hit with a slew of injuries after being relatively fit in the early part of the season, meaning the forward mix has regularly changed in terms of personnel and as a result they haven’t been able to maintain that well-oiled-machine chemistry.

New recruit Jed Anderson did a 10-week hammy in Round 1, Shaun Higgins has been out ever since a St Kilda defender landed on his knee, Taylor Garner is in hamstring limbo once again after impressing in last year’s finals series, Kayne Turner has done multiple hamstrings (and, yes, a drink-driving suspension), Jarrad Waite has sat out several weeks with a hip complaint and Mason Wood, just as he had people realising that North do have good players under the age of 35, copped a knee injury that will see him miss all or most of the rest of the season.

That sort of stuff does boil down to luck a bit but what is more concerning and harder to explain is North’s drop away in accuracy in front of goal.

In the first six rounds of the year, North converted their scoring shots to goals at an accuracy rate of 50 per cent or better every week, but a significant drop began in North’s almost-loss to St Kilda in Round 7 and has regularly reared its head since – four times in ten games, in fact, and two of them (against Hawthorn and Port Adelaide) have been heart-breaking losses. In Rounds 1-6 they were going at 63 per cent accuracy, from then on it has been just 53 per cent.

When you’re getting the ball forward less, that’s bad. When you’re also converting getting the ball forward into scoring shots less, that’s worse. When you’re also turning less of your scoring shots into goals, that’s really quite a problem.

The answer I suspect will be to get back some missing players, and in doing so establish greater continuity in the 22, particularly the forward line. A few extra hours of shot-on-goal practice wouldn’t hurt either.

Get these things right and there is still time for North Melbourne to do some damage in 2016. Despite having some tough opponents ahead, they are still only a win and percentage off the top four at the moment, and only need to travel away from Victoria once in what’s left of the year (and even that is only as far as their home-away-from-home, Hobart).

If these problems persist, however, then they may have already had their last win of 2016, and the doomsday scenario of going 9-0 only to drop out of finals could well come to pass.