DANNY Daly is central to North Melbourne's knowledge of its opponents, briefing his fellow coaches and players in the lead-up to each game.

This week North (4-9) meets the Sydney Swans (5-8) at the SCG on Sunday afternoon.

Looking at the form lines, the Swans are in a very similar situation to you.
They've won five and we've won four (for the season) and we haven't troubled the scorers for a few weeks. It's a must-win game for both clubs, not so much for finals aspirations but just to get a bit of momentum as we head into the last eight or nine games and, more importantly, for our supporters.

But you didn't have to worry about Barry Hall from about Tuesday.
At the game last week, I was watching him and thinking, 'Geez, he's starting to get a bit of form'. He'd kicked four up until that incident and I was already planning in the back of my head who could play on him, whether it was Scotty Thompson or Nathan Grima or Gibbo (Josh Gibson). As soon as the incident happened, I thought: 'Oh well, won't have to worry too much about that'.

It probably affects Gibbo more than anyone. He's going to be freed up now to play on someone like Ryan O'Keefe.
You've got O'Keefe but if Craig Bolton plays, you've still got (Heath) Grundy who will come back forward. He's been pretty good as a forward for them, especially in Sydney. They've played three times in Sydney and Barry Hall's only played in two of them. Michael O'Loughlin's missed one as well, so Grundy's been pretty important for them up forward. It's more than likely that Narni (Grima) or Scotty Thompson will get Grundy. Obviously (Ed) Barlow and O'Loughlin will play forward as well.

Have you and the players referred to a tape of last year's elimination final in preparing for this one?
It has not even been brought up once. We haven't brought up the game where we drew with them last year either. It's a clean slate and both sides have got some young and different players in. It's a completely different game.

What about things that went wrong on your road trip to Adelaide in round 12?
When you look back on that game, it was always going to be a tough ask in terms of kicking enough goals to win the game. Going into that game, we probably needed to mix our forward line up a little bit more. We didn't concentrate enough on how we were going to get the ball inside 50. We were more worried about how we going to stop Adelaide from scoring, which we were pretty good at. From that night I think we kicked 3.6 and only had something like 28 inside 50s, which isn't anywhere near enough to win a game of footy.

It's been flipped around a fair bit with Dean Laidley leaving, Darren Crocker taking the reins and a different flavour of footy that was played last week. Crock said this week that the side is attacking more but defence needs to be better. The Swans would encourage that a bit more than the Dogs, wouldn't they?
Absolutely. Sydney plays that type of game and it's something that they like to build their game around. They like to create as many stoppages as they can and they give you a real opportunity to defend but then attack, whereas the Doggies are all-out attack. If you can't defend as well, they can get through. It's been a key element which we've worked on this week at training – our defensive game. Not just our defenders but our forwards and our midfielders. When we talk about team defence, one of Sydney's greatest strengths is their ability to launch their scores from their defensive half. It's going to be really important for our forwards and our midfielders to make sure that they don't allow them to get easy outs from their defence. Blokes like Rhyce Shaw and Martin Mattner are very good at doing that.

The stoppage style of footy that they'll go for is part of the reason you've included Todd Goldstein.
It is. (Darren) Jolly's probably in All-Australian form and has been a very important player for them. It allows us to use Hamish (McIntosh) and Goldy to counteract that. With Sydney games you have between 100 and 120 stoppages a game. That's just the way they play their footy and it's manufactured through the size of the ground. It's going to be important for us to keep rotating those two blokes and keep putting pressure on Jolly. If Barlow, (Jesse) White or Goodsey (Adam Goodes) also go into the ruck, it's going to be important to give Hamish a hand in that area.

What happens with preparing for the smaller ground?
We've got an 11 o'clock flight from Melbourne and we'll have a bit of a light training run in Sydney so the boys can acclimatise themselves to the ground. We haven't played up there for four years. There are probably 70 or 80 per cent of our players who have never even seen the ground let alone played on it. It's going to be important for them to have a look and do a couple of specific drills, which we've done this week, so they get a good idea of the dimensions. We've trained this week using the dimensions of the SCG but for the boys to actually see it, train on it and understand how small it is, it's going to help our style of play.

Without being disrespectful, looking at Sydney's side you think, 'Who's worth tagging here?' Now that they've named Jarrad McVeigh, that's probably a job for Brady Rawlings or Sam Power.
When you talk about who you could run with against them, there are blokes of the ilk of Jude Bolton who leads their clearances and is pretty important to them at the SCG. Even though Brett Kirk normally goes to blokes, he's so influential for them and he is another one we might target. McVeigh has been in pretty good nick when he's been out there, not so much in his clearance work but his ability to score when he goes forward at stoppages. Adam Goodes is hard to match up on and is important for them. They've also got runners from defence in Shaw and Mattner. We just need to pick one or two who we feel are important on the day and have a defensive mindset for the rest.

Is Michael Firrito marked for that Goodes job?
We've got a couple of options this time around but Spud's the first one we may use. Drew can run through the midfield and do that and there's even a case that Gibbo might run with him at stages. You'll find on Sunday that we'll rotate a fair bit off him. He's got fantastic endurance and can go all day and is one of the elite runners in the competition.

Aaron Edwards would have seemed an obvious inclusion to the punters given Ben Warren's injury. Why was he not brought in?
It was a case where Azza went back last week and played pretty well at North Ballarat, kicked three goals and had a reasonable impact. There are still a couple of areas of his game that he needs to work on. We felt that one game was probably not enough for him to justify coming straight back into the side. Corey Jones was reasonably good last week, Drew was good when he went forward and Haley probably needs to find a bit more form this week. A couple of our taller forwards are probably on their last chance. Even though it's a bye for North Ballarat this week, Aaron needs another week to show us he's ready to come back in.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the club.