Marlon Brando sits in the back of a taxi with his brother and a pistol between them and delivers the most famous four seconds in the history of regret. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.

He was a longshoreman. So, as it happens, are Norths.

Now, nobody at North Sydney threw a fight this year and there is no Johnny Friendly counting money in a back room at the Oval (or is there? No, I jest). But there is a very particular ache reserved for the side that does almost everything right, and the Shoremen spent 2026 marinating in it.

Not the wooden spooners’ ache. They get to laugh about it, and the laughing is a mercy. Not the flogged either, who go home knowing exactly what the problem is and roughly how long it takes to fix. I mean the side that wins more games than the club above it, scores more than it concedes, gives the team that pinches its spot an absolute shellacking, and then watches September from the same seat as you and me.

What will keep this mob awake over summer is not that they were a long way off it. It is that they were never more than one of anything off it. One try. One bonus point. One place on the table.

They did the shift. Nobody handed them the tab.

Budge(y smuggler) up, this one stings.

Clocking on for the second shift

They turned up late. Not in attitude, in arithmetic.

Round 1 at Woollahra and the Beasties put 47 on them before anybody had found the whistle. Round 2 at Manly Oval they hauled themselves all the way back to level, then dropped the ball cold after the bell and carried two points home instead of four. The Pirates and the Wicks were both turned over at North Sydney, Callum Sirker helping himself to a hat-trick in the second of those. Then the Rats had a go, and then the Woods out at Cowra on country round, which is a long way to travel to be disappointed.

Six rounds gone. Two wins, a draw, three defeats, and a side still working out who was carrying what.

“Struggling to find their feet” is what I wrote at the time and I would write it again, because the football was never the problem. The cohesion was. Beer has since called it precisely what it was, “a stark reminder that you need to start fast in this comp.”

Here is the thing about those six rounds, though. The twelve competition points they dropped in those three defeats are not what did the damage. Norths took two bonus points out of a possible six across that opening stretch, and that is the loose change they left on the dock. Nobody ever goes back for loose change.

A point light in the pay packet

Right. Let us count the envelope.

Ten bonus points. That is the whole haul for the year, and it only really lands when you hold it next to somebody else’s. Wests won four games all season and scraped together thirteen. Souths did not win a single one and banked sixteen. Norths won ten games and collected ten bits of loose change.

Nine of the ten were attacking points. Exactly one was a losing bonus point, out of seven defeats. Because when this mob lost in 2026, they lost properly: only once all year were they beaten by seven or fewer.

Three of their ten wins came by three points. Their losses went twenty-eight, twenty-seven, seventeen, fourteen, ten and ten. Norths spent the season winning the arm wrestles and getting flogged in the blowouts, which is exactly the wrong way round if you want the pennies. The Two Blues did the precise opposite and walked off with nineteen.

And here is what it cost. Eastwood took the last finals berth with nine wins, nine losses and a differential of minus ninety-three. Norths had ten wins, a draw and plus thirty-nine. More wins, a hundred and thirty-two points of daylight between the differentials, and one fewer competition point on the table, 52 to 53, because the Woodies had seven more bonus points.

One point. At 53 apiece the tiebreak goes to wins, and Norths had ten to Eastwood’s nine.

So where did it go? Round 6 beaten by ten, three points short of a losing point. Round 7, Souths seen off 24-21 on three tries, one meat pie short of an attacking one. Round 8 at Woollahra, beaten by ten again. Three points closer in either and the envelope is full. Round 9, Hunter done 22-19 on three tries again. Four afternoons, four near misses, two of each.

Four ordinary, forgettable, nothing-much afternoons in April and May. Any single one of them rewrites the season.

“The bonus points that we left out early on in the year ended up costing us,” Beer said when it was all done. Which is the most restrained sentence anybody uttered in 2026.

One crate short of a full load

The envelope was light for a reason that has nothing to do with luck, the ref, or the draw. Norths could not get enough cargo over the line.

Sixty-one tries through Round 16. Fourth fewest in the competition, which puts them in a queue with Souths, West Harbour and Eastwood, and that is not a queue a side with a positive differential expects to find itself standing in. Randwick, one rung up, had seventy-eight. That seventeen-try gap is the whole ballgame, because an attacking bonus point costs four tries a week and Norths only got there nine times in eighteen.

Now here is the bit that should not be structurally possible. They conceded more tries than they scored, sixty-five to sixty-one at the Round 16 cut. A side with a minus try count and a plus thirty-nine differential is a dog walking about on its hind legs.

The dog’s name is Matt Minogue.

80.8% on all goals, fourth in the grade. On conversions he went at 85%, which puts him dead level with Will Kaye, and if you were here a fortnight ago you will remember we handed Kaye the finest boot in the competition. Nobody in the grade converted better than those two.

He was a metronome in a season that gave him precious little to be metronomic about, and the genuinely daft part is that he missed a great slab of the middle of it. Matt Ryan had a turn with the tee. Robbie McIntosh had a turn, and a very tidy one. Max Burey had a turn. At one point Josh Barr, a man built for carrying furniture up stairs, had a turn. And Minogue still finished in the top four. Somebody give him a key to the building.

The rest was graft, and I mean that as the compliment it is. 47% possession, which is to say they spent more of every afternoon without the football than with it, and only Manly saw less. James Margan turned the back of a maul into a small family business. Sirker finished with eleven on the wing, eighth in the grade. And Josh Barr carried like a bloke on piece rates, which Beer rates him for and which anybody standing at Granville in Round 10 already knew for nothing.

Unglamorous, unfashionable, deeply watchable football. The kind you only properly appreciate from the hill.

Just never quite four tries’ worth of it.

Seventy-one points and nowhere to put them

And then they got good.

Round 13 at TG Millner: eight tries, 48-26 over the Woods, and suddenly Norths were one point outside the top six with five rounds to play. Everything they needed was sitting right there on the dock.

Round 14 took it straight back off them. Concord, game of the round, 33-28, four tries and a five-point margin with Pete Samu forcing the knock-on as the clock went red. Two bonus points out of that afternoon, the only losing one of their entire year, and a defeat all the same. Then Round 15, which was worse for being televised: Gordon came to North Sydney Oval and won 41-14, and there is no telling of that afternoon that flatters a soul.

So of course they won their last three.

Hunter 44-12. Manly 33-26, in which Sam Kitchen played his 150th game of first-grade football and went over from five out, and a bloke who has given one club 150 afternoons has earned himself a line of his own right here. Then Forshaw Park in Round 18, boggy as you like, needing a win with a bonus point to have any chance at all.

They scored 71. Eleven tries. Liam Dinnell was over inside eighty seconds and for half an hour they ran at close to a point a minute. They did exactly, precisely, to the letter, what the situation asked of them.

Norths missed the cut by one point.

Seven wins from their last ten, their best football of the year in its final month, and the season was gone before they found it. The loose change from April was still sitting on the dock in August, and no amount of 71 was ever going to pick it up.

I coulda had class

None of this is new, which is the part that ought to come with a warning label.

2017 grand final: beaten by the Rats, 30-25. Five points. 2023 grand final: beaten by the Wicks, 17-15. Two points. 2024 grand final: beaten by the Beasties, 36-35. One point. 2026: missed the finals by one point.

Five, two, one, one. The gap halves every time they turn up and it has never once closed.

It is a modern affliction rather than an ancient curse, mind. Their older grand final defeats were floggings, the sort a club can eventually be philosophical about over a beer: nine points in 1929, sixteen in 1959, twenty-one in 1965, twenty-three in 1998. Nobody walked out of those thinking it had been lifted off them.

The one they won is the odd one out. 2016, 28-15 over the Students at North Sydney Oval, a thirteenth straight win and a first decider in eighteen years. A thirteen-point stroll, and a forty-one-year drought broken on the most comfortable afternoon of the lot. Every tilt since has gone to the wire and every single one has gone the other way. The Beasties got them by a point in 2024 and then went and won the thing again this year, which you would cut from a script for being too much.

So nobody is begrudging the North Sydney faithful a bit of shoulder-sag. But there is a difference between a club that is fading and a club that keeps getting itself into contention, and Norths are emphatically the second thing.

It is worth remembering what this one has absorbed. After the 2024 decider they lost seventeen of their twenty-three grand final squad to retirement and professional contracts. That is Beer’s own number, and it would flatten most clubs in the competition. They made a preliminary final the very next season.

Which is exactly why seventh stings rather than consoles. This was not a side rebuilding from the floor. It was largely last year’s prelim finalists with additions, and Beer has been straight about it: a reasonable win-loss record that was not enough. But have a look at what the reasonable record actually was. Ten wins, more than the club that played finals. A positive differential in a year when the side that went through finished ninety-three points in the red. Seven wins from the last ten.

Nobody carried them there. They were one envelope short.

Beer has already named the next shift, too, and most of them are barely into their twenties: Barr, Marshall Le Maitre, Burey, Henry O’Donnell. He is clear-eyed about the market as well, pointing out that the big-budget clubs take most of the best talent off the board and that a club like his wins by developing whoever is standing behind them. On the evidence of 2026, he is rather good at it.

Which brings us back to the waterfront, and the bit everybody forgets about that film. Terry Malloy does not win the fight. He gets beaten half to death on the dock. Then he gets up, and he walks the length of it anyway, and every man on that waterfront falls in behind him.

This is not a side in decline. It is a side that keeps arriving at the door.

One of these years somebody is going to open it, and the Shoremen will be very hard to quieten down when they do.