Roos in the Rain: What This Loss Means for North’s 2026

There are two types of pain in this game: the kind that surprises you, and the kind you saw coming from about three suburbs away. After watching North Melbourne take on Port Adelaide at Adelaide Oval in Round 17, I reckon the Kangaroos faithful are well-acquainted with the second variety by now.

I’ll be honest — as an Essendon supporter, I’ve got no business feeling smug about anyone else’s football club. My lot have been doing spectacular things to my blood pressure for the better part of two decades. But there’s something about watching North Melbourne right now that feels uncomfortably familiar, like looking into a mirror that’s been left in the rain for too long.

The Power Do What Good Teams Do at Home

Port Adelaide were simply better on the night — or the afternoon, whatever the case was at Adelaide Oval. The Power are one of those sides who make home ground advantage feel like an actual, tangible thing rather than just a stat someone wheels out on a broadcast. Ken Hinkley’s mob have built something genuine there, a sense that crossing that white line at their place is going to cost you something meaningful.

Port’s midfield were ferocious in the contest. They won the clearances, they won the inside-50 count in the first half, and they made life miserable for anyone in Kangaroos blue trying to build something going forward. When Port are running like that, the game has a kind of inevitability to it — like watching a tide come in on a flat beach. You see it happening but there’s not a lot you can do.

North’s Problem Isn’t Fight, It’s Structure

Here’s what I’ll give North Melbourne credit for — they don’t go quietly. There are sides in this competition who essentially hold up a white flag the moment the scoreboard gets uncomfortable, and North aren’t one of them. They kept pressing, kept trying to find entries into their forward line, and there were patches in the third quarter where you thought, right, this might actually get interesting.

But the issue for Alastair Clarkson’s side isn’t desire. Never really has been since Clarko got there and started pulling the culture into shape. The issue is structural — the way they defend transition, the way they convert their inside-50s into genuine scoring chances. North had their moments going forward but too often the ball went in and came straight back out, like a tennis ball bouncing off a brick wall. Port’s defensive setup was disciplined and the Kangaroos didn’t have enough weapons to unpick it consistently.

The Young Ones: Progress Is Still Progress

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again because it matters — you can not judge a rebuild solely on scorelines in July. Essendon fans should know this better than anyone. We’ve had rebuilds that were supposed to take three years and somehow stretched to about eleven, but that’s a different story and my therapist says I shouldn’t dwell.

The encouraging thing about watching North’s kids play is that they look like actual AFL players now. A few years back some of those youngsters looked overwhelmed at this level, like they’d been dropped into the deep end without proper swimming lessons. These days there’s composure, there’s structure in how they move the ball, and some of them are starting to impose themselves physically in the contest. That’s real progress, even if the scoreboard doesn’t always reflect it.

Losing to a quality side like Port at their home ground doesn’t tell you much you didn’t already know about where North sit in the competition hierarchy. What matters is whether those young players take something useful out of the experience and bank it for the second half of the season.

Hinkley’s Crew and the September Question

Port Adelaide look like a team building nicely toward finals. They’ve got the midfield engine, they’ve got a forward line that can hurt you in multiple ways, and their defence has that quiet, professional quality that makes scoring against them genuinely hard work. This is a side that could make some noise in September if they stay healthy and the draw is kind to them.

What I find interesting about Port is the way Hinkley has managed the balance between his established players and the next generation coming through. It’s a genuinely tricky thing to get right — lean too hard on the veterans and you stall, push the kids too fast and you lose the wins that keep everyone’s confidence up. Port seem to have threaded that needle about as well as anyone in the competition right now, and that’s a credit to the coaching group.

What Round 17 Actually Tells Us

Look, here’s my honest read of this game: it went about how you’d expect when you put Port Adelaide at home against a North Melbourne side that’s still a year or two away from consistently competing at this level. The final margin wasn’t embarassing for the Roos but it was definitive — Port were in control for long enought stretches that there was never a real sense of danger for the home side.

North’s position on the ladder after Round 17 isn’t where any Kangaroos fan wants to be staring at on a Monday morning. But the honest truth is the ladder position is a symptom, not the disease. The disease — if you can call it that — is the standard time lag between a club deciding to rebuild and that rebuild actually producing consistent wins. North are somewhere in the middle of that process, which is genuinely the hardest place to be.

I’ve watched Essendon navigate versions of this particular purgatory multiple times. You’re not bad enough that the pain comes quickly and cleanly. You’re just good enough to give people hope before falling short. It’s uncomfortable territory, but clubs do come out the other side.

The Bigger Picture for the Kangaroos

The games North Melbourne win in the second half of this season will be important — not just for confidence, but for understanding where the ceiling actually is right now. There are sides in the bottom half of the competition that North are capable of beating consistently. Doing that, building some winning habits and finishing the year with some momentum, would be a legitimate achievement given the squad’s age profile.

Clarkson knows what it takes to build a winner — he’s done it before at a level few coaches in the history of this game have managed. Whether that’s reassuring or just puts more pressure on the timeline is probably a matter of where you sit as a Kangaroos supporter.

Either way, they’ll line up again next week, Port will bank the four points, and the competition rolls on. That’s footy. It’s not always pretty, but it’s never boring — and as a bloke whose club once made national news for reasons I’d rather not revisit, I can tell you that complicated, messy football is still better than no football at all.

North fans, stay patient. Or at least try to. I know. It’s easier said than done.