A disappointing loss to Carlton almost a fortnight ago still burns inside for Drew Petrie and his team-mates.

While many teams would have enjoyed the break over the bye, for the vice-captain it only delayed North’s chance to avenge a forgettable effort.

“The bad side to that (split round) was we’ve had a loss that’s been sticking in our guts for that time against Carlton,” Petrie told Channel Nine’s Clint Stanaway.

“It was a pretty poor performance again; one of those inconsistent ones we’ve been good at this year.

“You never accept losing, but if you get beaten by a better side and you perform well on the night you can kind of deal with it. But when you perform badly, and not to take anything away from Carlton, but when you know you can play a hell of a lot better than what you did that makes things a whole lot worse.

“Saturday night can’t come quick enough.”

The Roos’ hopes of playing in September count on strong performances in the remaining five rounds of the season. Anything less and there’s teams on the cusp ready to pounce.

“We’ve still got to make sure we remain in the eight and that starts with Geelong on Saturday night,” Petrie added.  

“I think a couple of weeks ago we were eyeing a possible top four spot, but now we’ve just got to worry about staying in the eight.

“Geelong rolled us pretty comfortably down there earlier in the year, they controlled the whole game and we were fairly average for four quarters so we’re looking to rectify that.”

On paper, North has a favourable run home. But as this year has proven, no result is a given.

“We’ve seen that Carlton and Brisbane and other sides have beaten us this year who haven’t been in the top eight, so we can’t take anything for granted. We can’t assume anything going into games we’ve got to approach every game like we did Hawthorn a few weeks ago.

“Finals aren’t even spoken about because of the situation that we’re in. We’ll worry about that when we’re locked in after the Round 23 game against Melbourne.”