With the 2022 AFL season complete, Kane Cornes and Garry Lyon have gone through all 18 clubs and come up with burning questions for each.
The Kangaroos won a second straight wooden spoon this season and to cap it off, lost last year’s number one draft pick Jason Horne-Francis in the trade period.
For North Melbourne, Cornes simply wants to know what their best case scenario is for 2023.
“I’m about as pessimistic on North Melbourne as I have been on any club in history,” Cornes told SEN Breakfast.
“I want you to give me the counter-view on North and the burning question is what is the best case scenario for North Melbourne in 2023 and what is the ceiling of what they can get to?
Lyon believes it will come down to competitiveness and effort across the season.
“Percentage is a good way of measuring it as opposed to specific win-losses and this could be the Alastair Clarkson factor,” Lyon said.
“His ability to come into the club, if it all gets worked out, and put some defensive mechanisms that ensure you don’t get opened up in the way they did.
“Good Friday games, Alastair Clarkson coached team on the big stage, -190-point aggregate across two years, I’m not sure that sort of stuff would happen.
“The best case scenario is that gap in the percentage. Their percentage was 55 this year, which is suggesting they’re in a pretty parlous place, but I’ve seen it from other clubs and you can’t fix it in a week or a month or a year.
“I think they’ve got the right man if he is able to do it.
“My question back to you is where will Clarkson make the biggest difference?”
Cornes: “I think it will be the defensive stuff, but just the standards holistically. Some of the effort was as bad as you’ve seen and their ball-use, I haven’t seen a team turn the footy over as poorly and as often as they did.”
“Some method with the way they use the ball and the way they defend the ground and just the general standards. The whole of the football club will lift.”
North Melbourne enters the National Draft with picks two and three and will be hoping to bolster the young talent already on the list.