NORTH Melbourne is treating Saturday’s final NAB Challenge match is a dress rehearsal for round one and plans to field a full strength side.
The Kangaroos take on Melbourne at Casey Fields and will do so with captain Adam Simpson, superstar Brent Harvey, Daniel Wells and key forward Nathan Thompson.
Before training at Trinity playing fields in Bulleen on Friday, assistant coach Darren Crocker said that quartet had been left in Melbourne last weekend when North went to Perth to take on Fremantle but were raring to go this week.
“They all come in this week and just need to get a bit of game time up before round one,” Crocker said.
“As far as management is concerned we have just been watching each player’s game time and after this weekend we think we’ll have it pretty spot on to where we want to be.”
Crocker is again in charge of defence at North Melbourne and has the unenviable task of trying to come up with someone to replace the great Glenn Archer.
He is likely to try a couple of wildcards – Leigh Harding and Daniel Wells – but each would play a vastly different role to that of the Shinboner of the Century.
“I don’t think you can ever fill the hole that Glenn Archer is going to leave in your defence but some guys really stepped up last year – Daniel Pratt, Josh Gibson, Michael Firrito were all terrific with the way they went about their football,” Crocker said.
“And with Thomo (Nathan Thompson) coming back, it might give us the opportunity to play Drew Petrie more down back and he showed [in] the second half of the [2006] that he is more than capable down there.
“You can’t fill the hole but we’ll have a few blokes that can step up. We may actually try Wellsy down there against Melbourne to see how he goes. And we have been experimenting with Leigh Harding.”
Crocker said the club’s thin injury list was a bonus heading into the season proper. “It [the injury list] is in pretty good nick,” he said. “We are treating this weekend against Melbourne as a full dress rehearsal going into round one.”
He suggested that Lachlan Hansen, Ben Ross and Gavin Urquart would have another chance to push for round one selection.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, we’ll try to settle the side down and if they are in our best 22 then that is fantastic.
“It means we are taking steps forward and our younger players are developing.”
Crocker also said North Melbourne wasn’t overly concerned about opposition scouts infiltrating training.
“It is a bit hard to keep them away from here [Trinity Grammar] and it is a bit hard to keep them away from Arden St as well,” he said.
Crocker said that some coaches got caught up in worrying about opposition scouts more than others.
“In saying that, there is a bit of an unwritten rule that if you do have a closed session, you wouldn’t expect an opposition forward scout to come to those sessions.”
