FINALS football is looming, but North Melbourne coach Dean Laidley has found time to share his compelling, often candid thoughts on the season so far in an exclusive question-and-answer session with kangaroos.com.au’s Steve Lavell.

In the first of a five-part series, Laidley discusses the outcomes of 2007 and the new direction of the club under chairman James Brayshaw and chief executive Eugene Arocca.

SL: The preliminary final of 2007 and the loss to Port Adelaide. What conclusions did you come to soon after that and what lessons did you learn or do you see the side learned from the finals series?
DL: During the game when I was talking to the boys I could just feel or I could see, just by the looks on their faces, that they were buggered. I think the whole pre-season, the early start, we changed our conditioning, we changed the way we played a little bit. It had been a very, long arduous season and we had a lot of sore boys who were playing with injections and they'd given their all. But I was still disappointed with the performance.

After the game, I probably thought that it's been great to make a preliminary final but we've got to keep evolving the side. We found some players last year and we've found some more players this year. I think the improvement's certainly come from them, come from our second-year players, but it's also come from guys like (David) Hale and (Drew) Petrie. (Brady) Rawlings has taken his game to another level, (Daniel) Pratt, Leigh Harding coming back off a knee reconstruction. They've just matured a bit more. They probably feel a bit more comfortable in their own body at AFL level.

Given the achievements of 2007 and the condition that the squad was in once it was all said and done, how did that affect your approach to the pre-season?
We gave them a rest, the eight weeks, so it was still a reasonable pre-season. We were lucky that we didn't have many or if any operations. We obviously had Thommo (Nathan Thompson) coming back from his knee reconstruction. It was just more rest and recovery rather than rehab or prehab. We were lucky in that sense. But it was still a pretty tough pre-season.

How significant was it for the coaches and players to say goodbye to Glenn Archer?
I think it was time. It had probably been two-and-a-bit years in the making. I worked pretty closely with Glenn over that period of time. It was tough because he'd been such a wonderful player and wonderful person for the footy club. But life goes on, the North Melbourne Football Club goes on.

He's been down a few times and it was only last week or the week before that I had him down, I think it was before the Brisbane game, to talk to the players for the first time. He loved the opportunity to do that and it was a very basic speech, but it was just fuelled with some wonderful pointers about how he went about the game.

The change in leadership at the club - James Brayshaw and Eugene Arocca coming on board – describe the impact they've had.
What it's done now is given us a real focus; what we're doing next week, next month, next year, the next 10 years and beyond. They've done a hell of a lot of work since the decision was made to put a really strong platform in place to secure the future, but also to give as much support as they can to the football department.

In this caper, we're in the business of winning games. [Now] we can continue to be successful and continue our drive to win our next premiership. That's all we're here for. Their support and their day-to-day and week-to-week communication, particularly for myself, has been very good and much appreciated.

So you consider the confirmation that Arden Street will get some new facilities to be the biggest boost?
It is. I suppose since we had the fire back in 2006, we lost a lot of stuff, but coming out the other side and how we've re-jigged what we had left works extremely well now. It probably just doesn't look as good as some other facilities, but what we actually have got is very efficient.

The biggest thing it will do from my point of view is bring both the football department and the rest of the football club together. I think that's been a major hurdle, certainly at this footy club since the early nineties where we've been on two separate sites and on three at some stages. That will help both sides of the business unite and even work a little bit better. But I think it'll also help the players, getting a real understanding and respect for what people do on the other side of the business and having a great facility to train at.

It's a huge step in going forward and I suppose the other thing is that it's bringing us back to the North Melbourne community.

When you signed your last deal, did your commitment to the club hinge on the promise of resources for the footy department?
Not so much hinge on it, but I thought we can't just flap in the breeze. I really thought we flapped in the breeze for a few years, just treading water, and it was time to make a decision. It was a time to dig in, stay here, find a real niche in Melbourne or, if that wasn't going to be the case, get going and get out of here.

Everyone, and certainly I, have appreciated that we've stayed and we can thrive rather than survive in Melbourne. I've taken that line for probably the last two-and-a-bit years and have just kept pushing it and pushing it. I can start to see some dividends of that happening around the footy club.