Scott on North Melbourne

It is still a relatively small sample size, but I think they have improved on last year.

I could make that case for any team, the hard part in this competition is you can improve and not win any more, because everyone is improving alongside you.

It would stand to reason that they will be getting incrementally better with the stack of young talent that they have got in there, it is almost getting to the stage where you wouldn't refer to them as young talent.

They are almost through that academy kind of phase, they have some genuine high-level players who are starting to have a real impact. 

Scott on the review of last week

As you know, it is a good question to ask but that is not my habit, to explain private conversations. But I think more broadly, hopefully I have always taken this view individually as a coach and I am certain collectively we have as a coaching group, that we prefer to focus on patterns rather than what may well be isolated incidents.

Last week was a bad game on a number of fronts for us, we were really disappointed in our performance. But I don't think it constitutes a pattern just yet.

So without going into the individual areas of where we were off and unfortunately, sometimes there is a bit of a compounding effect when you have a bad night, it wasn't just one or two areas.

There were some issues we had with individuals that impacted parts of the ground. The obvious one was Blicavs, but there are others as well.

You put it all together, you step back and think wow, it was one of those nights where what could go wrong, did go wrong. 

Scott on whether he is confident in the Edwards v Xerri battle

More than confident, maybe over confident.

I really rate him, I think he is going really well. Again, this probably sounds a little over confident because I really rate Xerri.

It is very unlikely that Mitch is going to come up in games where he is going to get done for size, strength and aggression, that sort of thing.

That is his one-wood, he has got a few others as well. In the wars a bit, he dislocated his finger and you can put that in the cracked fingernail category, he shook that off pretty quickly. 

Scott on Gryan Miers

A little bit different, in that he is getting some really high quality training.

So he is certainly, I haven't actually got the feedback from today, but it is positive. He is certainly doing enough work to think that if that continued, that he would be available.

It has been a bit of an unusual one and the more complicated they get, the less likely that it is a good idea for me to get more involved because it is easier to get confused.

But again, our system is that we trust the experts in that area and try not to get sidetracked by the speculation. 

Scott on Dangerfield's progress

To be fair, if you were just isolating your observation to the game and had missed the previous three months, you are probably missing a bit.

If you think back to his prep, he was going really well around about the time we were coming into Origin, and has been almost completely interrupted since then. There has been some good training in the last month or so without playing that much.

I think it is wildly optimistic to think that he could come in off the back of three months of limited preparation and fix the game for us as a midfielder. I don't think it is a secret to say that he is not as his best at the moment, but we are prepared to work with him to get him to that point.

One of the exciting things, at least from my perspective, the last two or three years or maybe even going back to 2022. He missed a big chunk of the first half of that season through injury and we really held him back, then he was pretty influential towards the end.

So we are not planning it that way in season 2026, but we do have a bit of evidence that it is not the worst way to go.