Fair To Say

As an AFL fan, how can we reconcile the fact that North Melbourne put away Hawthorn a week ago as only one of two teams to do so this season, have been the only team to defeat the Western Bulldogs, beat the Pies, ran Geelong to a kick, drew with Sydney in a game they were robbed of through technical shenanigans… yet they have also lost to Fremantle, Essendon and now St Kilda?

Sometimes Australian football looks like a game of Rock Paper Scissors to me. Of course we are regularly introduced to new tactics within games during certain situation - such as the Huddle when kicking out, the Wall and now the Cluster to clamp down on opposition rebounding - but in general terms, there are only three types of game plans: man on man, flooding and attack. When both sides flood, enabled by starting an extra man or two in defence as happened in today’s game at the MCG between Richmond and Carlton, the football is painful to watch and not much happens. It’s the equivalent of both Roshambo players calling Paper: a stalemate.

Rock, of course, is the man on man approach, and it is designed to blunt the attacking style of the Scissors teams like the Dogs, Hawks and Cats, which is why North has been doing well against them. Rock doesn’t handle Paper so well as we know, and St Kilda is now a devoted student of the flooding approach. Unfortunately for coach Ross Lyon, St Kilda usually gets cut to pieces by the Scissors approach - Sydney, the master, were beaten by the Dogs earlier in the year in the cleanest example yet of how a good side can scythe its way through the flood if players back themselves to run through the lines.

New Essendon coach Matthew Knights had been testing out Scissors with his crop of young players while still in his honeymoon period, leading to some fair floggings, and in the last months he’s been trying out Rock with a little more success. Of course, the ultimate in AFL jan-ken-pon is a team that can change its call midway through a game and get away with it, as the Hawks did against Port Adelaide earlier this year: the Power jumped Hawthorn in the first half with its own forward-running Scissors variant, but coach Alistair Clarkson changed from Scissors to Rock at the main break and ground out the win.

Okay, so maybe the analogy is wearing a bit thin at this point. The point is, where do North go from here? Their draw opens up a little in the second half with two meetings with the rapidly decelerating Power, plus Melbourne once, and Geelong late when the Cats’ cue should be heading towards the rack. If the Roos didn’t have to travel to play Brisbane at the Gold Coast once again it would be pretty favourable, in fact. Four points from the last 20 isn’t good form in anyone’s language, nevertheless, and the top three Scissors exponents will be hoping not to have to face the Rock of Arden St in the finals.