North Melbourne’s Brent Harvey believes the experience the club’s crop of emerging youngsters have gained together will bring about great improvement in 2013.
Senior coach Brad Scott has provided opportunities for the Kangaroos’ up-and-comers to play regular senior football in recent years, and Harvey says that approach will pay dividends.
“… (Shaun) Atley and (Kieran) Harper, they’re the ones that everyone talks about; (Ben) Cunnington and (Ryan) Bastinac, they’ve all played 50-60 games together now and I think what I’ve seen over my career is teams start gelling when that young group have all played 50-60 games together,” Harvey told Andy Maher and Tim Watson on SEN 1116.
“You can’t expect too much from them when it’s 20-30 games and they are still learning each other’s style, but it’s pretty much right now when you’ll see the improvement from that group.”
The 346-game veteran will sit out the first six matches of the season through suspension, but looks forward to seeing who rises to the challenge in his absence.
“It’s going to be really, really good. We’ve got a lot of depth now and we can look at those young guys to really start taking over our footy club."
Harvey says North’s off-season additions from other clubs, Taylor Hine, Ben Jacobs and Jordan Gysberts have had no troubles fitting in at their new club.
“Benny Jacobs is one of the most professional guys I’ve seen come through our footy club. He’s really switched on and loves his footy.
“Jordy’s (Gysberts) just gone about his footy the way he should be, and that’s training really, really hard and setting a great standard for our younger guys to follow.”
The Kangaroos travelled to Geelong's Simonds Stadium on Friday for another competitive skills session with the Cats.
“We can implement the stuff we want to try throughout the season that we’ve been training for, and Geelong can do that, and we’re not mirror-imaging each other," Harvey added.
“When you get tackle someone, there’s no driving them into the ground. It’s pretty much exactly like you’d treat your team-mate. We do really look after each other and I think for this little experiment to work it’s got to be that way.”
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