ALASTAIR Clarkson and Sam Mitchell will spend this week telling us that Saturday's North Melbourne-Hawthorn match is not about them and that there are no grudges between them.
But it is about them and there are grudges.
The personal rivalry storyline will feature as prominently as any other angle attached to the Roos' resurgence under Clarkson and Hawthorn's highly questionable and very deliberate bottoming-out under Mitchell.
North Melbourne, recipient of the past two wooden spoons, will head to Launceston's University of Tasmania Stadium on Saturday as one of just five teams to secure wins in both opening rounds of 2023. A one-point win in Perth on Saturday night against Fremantle, a semi-finalist last year, followed a five-point win against West Coast in week one, allowing the Roos to finally feel, after six seasons of various forms of off- and on-field mayhem, that the future will be at least OK.
It was a near-unbelievable thought only a month ago that by round three of 2023 North Melbourne could boast more victories than it did in the entirety of the 2022 year. It will start a very short-priced favourite on Saturday.
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Hawthorn is clearly sacrificing this year in the hope of a better future. It has been belted in both rounds – a woeful 81-point drubbing by Sydney on Sunday at the SCG following an equally confronting 59-point loss to Essendon in round one. The playing list cuts made by Mitchell in the off-season, particularly the removal of Tom Mitchell, Jack Gunston and Jaeger O'Meara, have already exposed his club to two dreadful beltings, with many more guaranteed to come.
I argued on multiple platforms last week, including AFL Daily on Friday, that the Hawks in 2023 were engaging in a form of tanking, in that while they believe they are making positive big-picture decisions, they gave up on this particular year before it even started. They have a percentage of 42.1 after two rounds and their players this season are ill-equipped to deal with seasoned, well-organised opponents.
Few people have traversed the AFL with as much confidence and self-conviction as Clarkson and Mitchell. They are required qualities in a brutal industry, but unless they are proven to be robots, they will experience some self-doubt at some stage of the season.
Beating his former star player would be of great satisfaction to Clarkson as he sets out on this second phase of coaching, and for Mitchell, an inaugural win for 2023 coinciding with a defeat of his former coach would certainly ease some of the building tension and frustration attached to the opening losses.
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Few know Clarkson better than Mitchell, and few know Mitchell better than Clarkson. They will go out of their way this week to act "normal, particularly inside their respective clubs. They will go out of their way to make out that coaching against each other on Saturday will be no big deal. But their egos, understandably, will at times certainly dominate their private thoughts and actions, and have them focusing on nothing else but each other.
The Clarkson-Mitchell coach-player dynamic was a powerful force within the extraordinary Hawthorn machine that reaped four premierships inside Clarkson's first 11 years as an AFL coach. Mitchell was captain for the first of those flags, in 2008. It was a purely professional relationship, rarely friendly, and nearly ended as early as 2011, the season before the Hawks reached the first of four consecutive Grand Finals.
It did come to an end after 2016, with Mitchell then spending two years at West Coast - one as a player and one as a key assistant coach in the Eagles' premiership of 2018. And then it resumed, as coach-assistant coach, with Mitchell returning to the Hawks on an unofficial promise from club powerbrokers that he would succeed Clarkson.
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That arrangement was formalised in July 2021, with club president Jeff Kennett announcing what was to be a severely botched succession plan. That new phase of their union lasted less than a week of its intended 14 months. The two simply could not stand to work alongside each other any longer, and with Mitchell now the dominant player, he didn't want Clarkson to stay, and Clarkson didn't want to stay.
Private comments by Clarkson to Mitchell in 2011 pertaining to Mitchell's ability to play to his optimum during his early stages of fatherhood forever changed their relationship. Mitchell wrote of this change in dynamic in an autobiography released in 2018.
In my eyes, the AFL has missed a major trick in failing to schedule the Clarkson-Mitchell showdown in Melbourne, and that is not intended as disrespect to the people of Launceston.
Clarkson coaching for the first time against Hawthorn is as historically significant as Ron Barassi coaching for the first time against Melbourne, or Mick Malthouse against the Eagles.
Coaching against Hawthorn and Mitchell in that game clearly elevates it to blockbuster. And with Clarko, it's always personal.
