Shinboner number: 844
Guernsey number: 7
Born: February 16, 1976
North Melbourne games: 306 (1995-2009)
Goals: 83
Captain: 2004-08
North Melbourne Hall of Fame inductee: 2026

Adam Simpson was always thinking about the game. A keen student of football with coaching aspirations, Simpson channelled endless mental energy into working out how he and North Melbourne could improve.

Longtime teammate Glenn Archer recalled:

“He would ring you a million times when we were playing with different ideas. ‘I reckon we should do this, this would help so and so’. In the last four or five years of his career, he was basically the club’s second midfield coach and he would often bring his laptop and give Powerpoint presentations on centre bounces and stoppages. I don’t know where he got the time.”

Another long-time teammate, Anthony Stevens, said Simpson’s understanding of modern football and drive for team success made him the “standout by a mile” to take over as North captain when he stood down at the end of 2003. “Simmo wanted to understand the game more than anyone,” Stevens said.

From 2004-08, Simpson captained North in 110 games. Only Wayne Carey (184 games) and Wayne Schimmelbusch (150) have led the club more often.

Few would have tipped 1993’s No.14 draft pick to reach such heights after he played just two games in his first two seasons at Arden Street. But he established himself as a senior regular in North’s imposing team the following year, playing every game in the 1996 premiership season.

Simpson often played run-with roles in his formative years and, at 185cm, proved a difficult match-up for opposition midfield stars such as Nathan Buckley at stoppages and in the air.

By the time North won its second premiership under Denis Pagan in 1999, Simpson had become one of the Roos’ prime midfield movers and over the next decade established himself as one of the competition’s elite inside ball-winners.

In 2002, he finished second in the AFL for contested possessions, equal fourth for clearances and equal third for centre clearances to win All-Australian selection, and then finished comfortably inside the competition’s top 10 for clearances and centre clearances over the next two seasons.

And from 1999 until his retirement in late 2009, he led North in clearances and centre clearances in six seasons and was second at the club in the other five.

However, Simpson’s most significant contribution to the game he studied so closely was his pioneering use of the ‘third-man-up’ tactic at around-the-ground ruck contests.

Until the AFL changed the law at the start of the 2017 season, players would routinely fly against the two competing ruckmen at stoppages. Simpson was one of the first regular exponents of the play.

He was good at it, too. In 1999, only ruckmen Corey McKernan and Matthew Capuano and support ruckman John Longmire had more hitouts for North than Simpson (48). He finished in the top five at the club in all bar one of the following nine seasons.

If Simpson had a weakness, it was his kicking. The left-footer was “hard on himself” about it too, according to Archer, but soon learned to play within his limitations, handballing or “kicking long to a contest rather than trying to be too fancy”.

Simpson could also fall back on a keen game sense, which enabled him to spot worrying trends in matches before they got out of control.

Garry Lyon came to appreciate Simpson’s rare football nous when he coached Australia in the 2002 International Rules Series in Ireland. “We played over in Ireland, really wet conditions, different game, all that sort of stuff, and as the game unfolded, I was watching on, thinking ‘Geez, we’re going to need someone as sort of a sweeper’,” Lyon said. “And before you even thought about who it was, you looked up and there [Simpson] was playing that role. He worked out for himself where the most dangerous spot was for us and he just assumed that role. He saved our arse that many times and you just sat there thinking, ‘Smart bloke, good leader, gets the job done’.”

Both Archer and Stevens expected Simpson would coach after his retirement. Said Stevens: “Of all the players I played with there were two guys who I always thought would be coaches, Alastair Clarkson and ‘Simmo’, and they weren’t disappointing.

Hanging up his boots in late 2009 after 306 games, Simpson served a four-year apprenticeship as one of Clarkson’s assistants at Hawthorn before taking over as West Coast coach in 2014 and leading the Eagles to the 2015 Grand Final.