North Melbourne’s VFL co-captain Chris Jansen believes the emerging Roos will be back to their best against the competition-leading Richmond on Saturday afternoon.
“We’ll be looking to bounce back big time,” Jansen told North Media.
“I think the whole competition is pretty close, our last result against Richmond wasn’t great. It’s just about playing our brand of footy.
“Anyone when they play their brand of footy in this competition seems like they can really challenge, from the top side to the bottom side.”
After enduring testing conditions last weekend, including a water-logged pitch at Casey Fields, Jansen says the disappointing result won’t affect North’s preparations going forward.
“I think it’s going to be a completely different day,” he said.
“It’ll be completely different conditions and we’ll play a different style of football. We’ll just go back to what we want to do well, which is win the contested footy in tight and we’ll spread hard from there.
“If we can have confidence in that and have all of our players on the page, it’s going to help us out a lot. All the fancy stuff takes care of itself.
“We’ll start with the basics, like defending well, which is going to help us.”
North and Richmond last met in a Round 6 curtain-raiser at Etihad Stadium.
Although the result favoured last year’s VFL grand finalists, who ran out as big winners, Jansen sees a silver lining in the performance.
“It was a disappointing day for us last time, we’ll look to bounce back in a big way,” he said.
“We can do that by starting well and play hard footy. We’ll slowly earn the pride back that way, the result will take care of itself.
“We’ve improved since last time and they’ll hope to have improved as well.
“I think we’ve come a long way from that game, at the moment it’s about getting a consistent brand of footy each week.
“We’ve definitely come a long way in the month or two since we’ve last played them [Richmond]. Hopefully it shows this weekend and over the next six weeks as well.”
Fans are invited to attend Saturday’s VFL match against Richmond at Holm Park, with the first bounce at 2.10pm.
