HAWTHORN’S Campbell Brown wants to set the record straight. Contrary to what’s been reported, he’s not a member of the North Melbourne Football Club. But he admits that he did try to join.
“I asked them to send me a membership form and I never received one so I never ended up signing up, but I did intend to. I’m still waiting,” he laughs.
The most important thing to point out about this chain of events is the timing.
Brown insists that his attempt at attaining membership was at the beginning of the season and nothing to do with trying to “kiss and make up” with North Melbourne’s Daniel Pratt, with whom he exchanged words with after the teams' tempestuous round three clash.
“Absolutely not. I don’t kiss and make up with anyone. He’s a good fella Pratty and I get on really well with him so it’s all a lot of fun,” he said.
“They’re a fantastic football club and I have a lot of respect for them. At the start of the year, they were trying to get as many members as they could to stay in Melbourne. I thought I’d do my little bit and try and help them out.”
However, Brown has more important things on his mind than waiting for the postman to arrive with his North Melbourne membership form.
This weekend the ladder-leading Hawks are eager to get back on a winning run when they face Essendon at Telstra Dome.
Hawthorn suffered its first defeat of the season against the Western Bulldogs on Saturday but Brown doesn’t think the round 10 setback is the end of the world.
“I think a loss every now and then is actually a good thing," he said.
"When you’re winning every week you can sometimes develop bad habits. You’re not as desperate. You’re not as fanatical in your approach to winning the ball. You just think it will happen.
"We just weren’t hard enough or hungry enough for the contest and the Western Bulldogs really were and they beat us comprehensively in that area of the game.
"So I think a loss is a really good wake up call for us and we can work on the areas now that over the last few weeks have just dropped away a bit.”
And just as coach Alastair Clarkson has been vocal in expressing his wish to see the Hawks return to playing a hard brand of football, so too is Brown.
“Our hardness around the footy has to improve," he said.
"We were a little bit disappointed that we got beaten in an area that we really do well at, which is our clearances, and also the Bulldogs out-tackled us.
"And they’re two areas of our game that we’ve really tried to work on and that we’ve really improved a lot over the last 18 months, so to lose those two key indicators it’s pretty hard to win games of footy.”
