Ken Hinkley had been in the supposedly unfashionable seat of Port Adelaide senior coach for less than a month. And he was not wasting time in the toughest job in Australian football.
In his first game-day message to his players - in the unusual surrounds of a famous cricket ground 16,200 kilometres from Alberton - Hinkley lit the candle to shine much-needed light in the tunnel of doom that had enveloped a battered team, a broken club and a frustrated supporter base.
"I said to the players," recalled Hinkley of that night at The Oval in south London in early November 2012, "that you always want to win and it doesn't matter if it is an exhibition game or anything for us."
Hinkley, who stepped into Alberton declaring he was the "right man standing" and not the "last man standing" for a job many others refused to consider, was taking over a team that had:
NO "winning season" in the five years after the 2007 AFL grand final loss,
WON just eight games of 44 in the previous two years,
JUST avoided its first AFL wooden spoon while ranking 16th of 17 in 2011,
EMOTIONALLY been rocked by the death of player John McCarthy while on an end-of-season holiday in Las Vegas.
"You knew that things were going to change," former Port Adelaide defender Jackson Trengove says of the first impression he gathered at the start of the Hinkley era in November 2012. "That London trip was where you knew Ken was not going to stand for what we had become - lacking success, unable to win games, not playing a good brand of footy ..."
Port Adelaide did win that night at The Oval. The team that had seemingly forgotten how to collect premiership points has a trophy - the "AFL Cup" - to show from that one-point win secured on Brad Ebert's set shot from 50 metres on a boundary usually marked for Test and English country cricketers.
The opponent that night was the Western Bulldogs. Nine years later, the two teams meet again at night on a cricket ground - Adelaide Oval - for a much more significant clash, an AFL preliminary final.
The prize is far more meaningful than a trophy that has become forgotten in time.
The last step to the 2021 AFL grand final also marks the first time Port Adelaide and the Western Bulldogs meet in an AFL final, after 33 home-and-away games in which the win-loss record favours Port Adelaide 18-15.
And how the script has changed in these nine years of the revival at Alberton!
Hinkley now has a team that has:
WINNING seasons in every year but 2016 (10-12),
WON 31 of 39 home-and-away games in the past two seasons, including a 17-win season this year for the first time since the 2004 AFL premiership,
CLAIMED the minor premiership in 2020 and consecutive top-four rankings for the first time since the super stretch from 2001-2004,
EMOTIONALLY lifted a supporter base that now stands on its feet to insist its club will never again be torn apart.
Port Adelaide has been transformed from a club trying to survive - against many damaging external agendas - to a revived empire "chasing greatness".
At The Oval at Kennington in early November 2012 there were seemingly endless steps to be taken on and off the field to ensure - as club president Greg Boulton declared at Alberton in December 1994 after collecting the hard-earned AFL licence - there would be a "Port Adelaide Football Club forever".
Now the last steps to the summit of an AFL premiership - always the most difficult in the journey to greatness - are the last challenge for a club that has significantly transformed its image and fortunes.
No-one can question the merit Port Adelaide's presence in the national competition any more, a question that was repeatedly asked in the most powerful halls of Australian football across 2011-2012.
For the record, Port Adelaide ranks sixth - with 273 wins - since the calendar turned to the 2000s (more wins than Adelaide, 269; or Richmond, 239; or Carlton, 180).
Hinkley left The Oval saying: "We are a club that needs to learn to win a little bit." Under Hinkley, Port Adelaide has won a fair bit - 121 of 201 matches (60 per cent winning rate) with a 5-4 win-loss record in five final series. This will be the third preliminary final since 2014. Such a script might have seemed a bit rich on leaving The Oval on November 3, 2012.
Now it is the foundation to grand ambitions at Alberton where the "Chasing Greatness" vision - three premierships in the next five years - stays true to the mantra of Port Adelaide "existing to win premierships".
Port Adelaide on Saturday night seeks the next big step towards the summit of an AFL premiership. The first step in this long journey was at The Oval in London nine years ago - and the storyline of seeking success after brutal knocks is true to everything Port Adelaide has endured from the start in 1870 to that hard-earned first premiership in 1884.
