When Alastair Clarkson was appointed coach of North Melbourne in August 2022, he was the largest figure in the sport. Ange Postecoglou had advised him to take on the most challenging role he could find. At that stage, the Roos were a puddle of a team. Jason Horne-Francis couldn’t get out of the place quickly enough.
At Clarkson’s first media conference, he spoke of a club that helped steer him on the right path after his brother had been killed in a car accident. The industry was pitiless, he said. But there were good people involved too, and the occasional moments of grace. His new president, the polar opposite of Jeff Kennett at Hawthorn, ran more than 100 programs supporting kids from non-English speaking backgrounds. The North Melbourne presidency, Dr Sonja Hood says, was her “weird job”. Kane Cornes described her as “uninspiring”. But she held her nerve, stared down the industry and got her man.
A few weeks later, a few days out from the grand final, the Hawthorn racism story broke . For a few days, it was unlikely that he’d even get to the starting line at North. But the club believed in him, supported him, built a strong PR campaign around him, and pushed back on the journalist who broke the story. The Kangaroos played up the quirky coach, the man who would show up to players’ homes with a guitar, David Brent style.
He started well at North, winning his first two games, including a win over a good Dockers side in Perth. But the investigation and the pressures of coaching wore him to a nub. Everyone who knew him well spoke of his resilience, his ability to compartmentalise, but he was struggling. He was throwing chairs at half-time of games. He wasn’t sleeping. Jordan Lewis said he was refused service at a petrol station. “Every interaction he has now is loaded,” North’s CEO, Jen Watt, said.
When he came back to coaching after an extended break, the state of the team was one of many problems. There was a prevailing view that he was the man to save them, to make them serious, to ship them into shape, to basically do what he did at Hawthorn. But it was a very different landscape in the 2020s to what it was in 2005. He couldn’t fly an entire playing list to Kokoda and terrify them into playing his way. He didn’t have gun players and emerging leaders like Sam Mitchell and Luke Hodge. He didn’t have the luxury of snaring a solar talent of the quality of Lance Franklin. And he never had anywhere near the calibre of assistant coaches he had at Hawthorn.
In press conferences, he would say the same things, week in, week out. Stick with us. We’re getting closer. At some point it will turn. He said it after annihilations and he said it after honourable losses. But the constant implorations for patience wore thin. They won nine games this year, but that included double-up wins against the bottom two teams. They were excellent on Good Friday against Carlton and later in the year against the Western Bulldogs.
But some of their losses were unforgivable. During games, Clarkson’s eyebrows would be arched in a kind of perma-frown. The bigger the deficit, the steeper the arch. His team would have individual passages of play, or half hours, or fortnights, that would suck all the hope and optimism. The loss to Fremantle in Bunbury was the sort of performance where you wouldn’t mind checking the betting sheets. Afterwards, Clarkson was as bereft as he’d been in his entire coaching career. “Soul-destroying”, he described it.
It’s not as though his North teams were hopeless: there are some excellent players in there, particularly in the on-ball department and up forward. Most of the time (though not in his final match against Sydney) they would try their guts out. They were just an incredibly frustrating, lopsided, hard-to-trust team. They’d completely mess up the fourth handball in a promising chain. They’d execute the perfect full ground transition and then miss the easy shot on goal. They’d do all the grunt work, lock the ball in their forward 25 and give away a silly free kick, whereupon the ball would instantly trampoline up the other end for a goal. And that goal would invariably turn into five or six in as many minutes.
Coach sackings like this often seem to come out of nowhere. But the more you have time to absorb them, the more they make sense. Clarkson’s task at North was a sisyphean one. But they never got the best version of him. In John Longmire and Adam Simpson, there are two premiership coaches and former North Melbourne players who seem perfect for the job. But we said the same thing about Clarkson four years ago.
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At Clarkson’s first media conference, he spoke of a club that helped steer him on the right path after his brother had been killed in a car accident. The industry was pitiless, he said. But there were good people involved too, and the occasional moments of grace. His new president, the polar opposite of Jeff Kennett at Hawthorn, ran more than 100 programs supporting kids from non-English speaking backgrounds. The North Melbourne presidency, Dr Sonja Hood says, was her “weird job”. Kane Cornes described her as “uninspiring”. But she held her nerve, stared down the industry and got her man.
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Source: theguardian.com · Jonathan Horn. Published 2 Sept 2026, 05:31 am.
