North Melbourne coach Brad Scott is not worried by external critics of his struggling team, and is determined to prove them wrong in the second half of the season.

Scott returns to the coaches box this Saturday night with his team precariously placed in 11th spot with a 6-7 record.

North's form has again been wildly inconsistent this season, and a wide range of football commentators questioned where the club is at after its meek 55-point loss to Gold Coast last Saturday night.

But Scott, who has missed the club's past four games after undergoing back surgery, said commentators had said North was struggling at times last season before it went on to make a preliminary final.

The Roos coach said many of the same commentators had again been wrong when they tipped North to be a top-four team in 2015.

"I sincerely hope you're wrong again right now and we'll prove you wrong in the second half of the year," Scott told reporters on Wednesday.

"We've got a lot of work to do to get that right, but there's still a lot of water to go under the bridge this year.

"Everyone's going to have their view and have their opinion, but the reality is that we're worried about trying to get better and, as I said, everyone had an opinion this time last year too and they were proven wrong.

"Everyone had an opinion in the pre-season, and so far they're being proven wrong. We're not going to worry about the fluctuations of people's opinions.

"We've got to focus on getting better, and if you've heard that before that's because it was the same before."

Scott said his back function was still limited but wouldn't affect him during games, save for the fact he will have to stand in the coach's box for the next weeks and will be a little slow walking up and down stairs.

The Roos coach said watching his team's games on TV during his forced sabbatical had given him a different perspective on what North needed to improve in the second half of the season.

"I've seen some things that perhaps I haven't seen on match-day before that you see on TV and a lot of it's perception: the way players are perceived, the way they act, their body language," he said.

"All those things have probably been brought into sharper focus."

Scott said one of the Roos' biggest focuses in the run home would be ensuring players did not stray from the team plan in an effort to step up when games were getting away from them.

"We're a football club that will always back ourselves to win from any position," Scott said.

"At three-quarter time in the Gold Coast game, we dropped the Ablett tag, a lot of senior players tried to win the game off their own boot (because they) knew we needed to kick a lot of goals in the last quarter. That backfired and we not only didn't kick goals we got scored against.

"When things aren't going our way it's a good attribute for our leaders to think that they've got to stand up, but at the moment they're going over and above and going outside of the way we want to play in an effort to try and change the course of the game.

"So we've got to be more consistent in our approach and predictable in our approach and trust that that approach will get us back from any position.

"We don't need to take undue risks like we did last weekend."