From the Pocket: Clarko’s North exit stacks up, but Roos never saw the best of him
Look, I’ve spent enough years watching my beloved Bombers front the Tribunal that I reckon I could pass the bar exam on match review gradings alone. But you don’t need a legal degree to read the tea leaves on Alastair Clarkson at North Melbourne — this one’s been coming for a while, and if we’re honest with ourselves, it makes total sense.
Clarko walking away from Arden Street isn’t a shock. What’s actually sad, if you strip away all the noise, is that a coach with four flags and a reputation as one of the great football minds of his generation never really got to show Roos fans what he’s actually capable of. North didn’t get the best version of Alastair Clarkson. They got a bloke wrestling with grief, health scares and a rebuild so brutal it would’ve tested Denis Pagan in his prime.
The timing always felt loaded
When Clarkson took the North job back in August 2022, it was framed as the biggest coaching appointment in years. This was a bloke who’d basically rewired how modern footy thinks about structures and pressure at Hawthorn, taking on what was, let’s be blunt, a genuine rebuild-from-the-rubble project. Jason Horne-Francis was already halfway out the door, the list was thin as a whippet, and the club needed someone who could sell a five-year vision to a fanbase that had already worn out three or four of them.
On paper it was a sensible marriage. Big name, big challenge, the sort of gig Ange Postecoglou reportedly told him to go and find. But footy doesn’t run on paper, it runs on Thursday arvo team selections and Sunday morning member forums, and from very early on this appointment carried a weight that had nothing to do with structures or game plans.
Personal stuff that no spreadsheet accounts for
Clarkson spoke openly at his first North press conference about the club helping steer him after his brother was killed in a car accident years earlier. That’s not a small thing to bring up on day one — it told you this appointment always meant more to him personally than just another coaching stint. Then, not long into the job, he was dealing with serious health issues of his own, plus the fallout and scrutiny from the Hawthorn racism allegations investigation that dragged his name through headlines he never asked for as North coach.
I’m not here to relitigate any of that — it’s been picked over plenty elsewhere, and the findings and processes around it are their own story. But you cannot tell me a coach going through all of that, on top of trying to drag a genuinely bottom-of-the-ladder list up the table, was operating at full capacity. Anyone who reckons he was kidding themselves.
The list he inherited was never going to sing straight away
Let’s talk footy for a second, because that’s meant to be my job. North Melbourne when Clarkson arrived were, to use the technical term, a shambles. Wooden spoons, a percentage that would embarrass a reserves side, and a list that had been stripped for parts over several years of tanking-adjacent recruiting strategy. Clarkson didn’t inherit a Hawthorn-in-2005 situation where the pieces mostly existed and just needed reshuffling. He inherited soil that hadn’t been turned over in a decade.
You could argue — and plenty of North fans have, loudly, on forums at 11pm — that some of the recruiting and list management calls under his watch didn’t help either. Big name arrivals who didn’t fit, kids given senior footy before they were cooked, a midfield brigade that’s still finding its identity. That’s fair critique. But even the greatest coaching mind in the comp needs actual footballers to coach, and for large stretches of this tenure North simply didn’t have enough of them.
What ‘the best version’ actually looks like
Go back and watch Hawthorn under Clarkson in his pomp. Structures that bent the game to his will, a midfield that pressed and pressed until opposition sides cracked, a ruthlessness in big moments that separated flag winners from finals fodder. That’s the version everyone signed up for when North announced the appointment with such fanfare back in 2022. That’s not the version Kangaroos fans have watched most weeks.
What they’ve got instead is a coach constantly triaging — managing a list four years light on experience, managing his own health, managing a media contingent that treated every press conference like a referendum on his character. None of that is the environment where Clarkson’s actual coaching gifts, the stuff that won four premierships, gets to breathe. It’s a bit like judging a chef by the meal they cooked during a power outage.
So the exit makes sense — for both parties
None of this is me saying North should’ve kept him on regardless. Clubs and coaches reach natural use-by dates, and if the fit isn’t working — for whatever combination of reasons, personal or football — then a clean break benefits everyone. North need a fresh voice for the next phase, whoever that ends up being, and Clarkson deserves to step away from a job that’s clearly taken more out of him than most outsiders appreciated.
But let’s not pretend this tenure is a fair test of his coaching legacy. It isn’t. It’s a case study in how much circumstance, timing and personal hardship can swallow even the biggest reputations in the game. As an Essendon man I know a thing or two about reputations getting swallowed by circumstances beyond anyone’s neat control — we’ve basically built a decade of content out of it.
North fans are entitled to be frustrated with results. That’s the deal you sign up for supporting any club stuck in the bottom half of the ladder. But when the history gets written on this one, I reckon the fairer verdict is that Arden Street never actually saw prime Clarkson. They saw a good coach doing his best in genuinely rough personal and football circumstances, and that’s a very different thing to a great coach failing.
Whoever North appoint next inherits a slightly more settled list and, hopefully, a slightly calmer runway. Clarkson, wherever he lands next — commentary box, consultancy, or another crack at coaching down the track — deserves to be judged on more than these three-and-a-bit seasons at Arden Street. Footy’s a results business, sure, but it’s also meant to have some memory for context. This is one of those times it should.
