With all the talk of youth development and rebuilding surrounding the North Melbourne Football Club, the team’s first priority has always been to get wins on the board.

General Manager of Football Brady Rawlings says despite the rocky start to the season, there are always positives to be taken from defeat.

“In our industry we deal in wins and losses and we’re 0-5 at the moment. Clearly it’s not a great place to be in,” Rawlings told Triple M.

“We’re certainly looking at the positives with a pretty refreshed list … I think we probably made a world record amount of list changes at the end of last year.

“We’ve had some really good games and opportunities for some young players … we’re certainly getting games into young players and finding out about a lot of players for the future.” 

In the Round 4 clash with Geelong, North went into the game with vastly less experience than the home side.

Geelong averaged 131 games played per player, while North averaged just 73, while the average age of each side was 27.3 years for Geelong and 24.2 for North Melbourne.

Rawlings said that while injuries to key players are not ideal, the opportunities they present for young players to press their cases at AFL level is a genuine win for the club.

“A bit of an issue at the moment is our injury rate which arguably eight of our best 12 are out at the moment through injury,” he said.

“Obviously we’d like to get our best players out there, but when they’re not it just gives opportunities, and we’ve been able to blood so many young players.

“We’ve played our first three draft picks who’ve played nearly every game this year. That’s a terrific position to be in for our members to see the future of the club.”

While the focus is firmly on this weekend’s clash with Fremantle, North is looking forward to travelling to Tasmania for the first time since 2019 to take on Melbourne next week. 

Rawlings says he can’t wait for his players to have the opportunity to play in front of a roaring Hobart crowd once more.

“We’ve got Freo this week over in Perth so our focus is purely on that game at this stage,” he said.

“We’ve earmarked this game from a long way out [with it] being our first game in Hobart for such a long period of time.

“Melbourne are undefeated at the moment so they’re currently travelling really well, but we’ve got a good record at Blundstone and would like to continue that.”