NORTH Melbourne and Geelong produced the first draw of the 2024 AFL Women’s season yesterday afternoon.

It was ultimately a fitting result for a match in which the momentum switched several times, but did provide two very contrasting moods from the head coaches involved post match.

North Melbourne coach Darren Crocker said that the result “was disappointing” for his side.

“We’d come off obviously a really strong win in round one,” he said. “[It was a] very different game. It was very dry up there and today with the wind and the wet, as I said to the players, just felt that Geelong got the game on their terms, especially in the second half, a lot more than we did.

“It morphed into a real territory game and we struggled with that and they benefited off that. I think it was, they were plus 11 for inside 50s, which isn’t the way that we want to play. We want to be able to adapt no matter what the opposition throw us, no matter what the conditions may be and we felt that we didn’t adapt that well today.”

Crocker also agreed that the Cats hurt them on the spread in the second half.

“A little bit of it had to do with us probably playing or trying to play a little bit of perfect football. But we’ll learn from it and we’ll move on,” he said.

On the flipside of the equation, it was a slightly more positive vibe from Cats’ coach Dan Lowther post match.

He noted that even though they still have not fully beaten North Melbourne in seven meetings between the sides, he and his troops feel like they are getting close.

“To finish on a draw after last week’s lost by two points, I feel like a win’s coming maybe,” he said. “So we’re positive with the way we’re approaching today’s outcome, but it would be nice to win clearly.”

North Melbourne really started to get on top of the Cats late in the first half before Geelong kicked back into gear in the second half.

“Class comes to the front in those scenarios. so I thought our girls battled really hard to negate their opportunities with the time in front half,” Lowther said. “The ball was living out in our front half for the majority of the game, which is brilliant, but we just probably off minimal entries, we gave up a couple of goals that kind of hurt us.”