STEVEN Salopek was struggling to find positives out of Sunday's clash with Geelong at Sleepy Hollow, but found one in the team's final-term performance.

Port Adelaide has struggled to see games out in recent weeks, getting overrun several times, culminating in the shock round 11 defeat to Carlton.

But against the team that beat them in last year's grand final they fared much better, winning the final term by three points despite being 10 goals down at the last change, something the 21-year-old said the side had worked hard on during the week.

"That obviously shows that what we do at training is actually flowing through into the game, which is a positive for us," he said in the rooms after the game.

"Hopefully our supporters can see that we're not giving up.

"The positive is that we ran the game out well in the last quarter, which we couldn't do last week.

"The game could have been a real blowout in the last quarter, and they could have won by 15 or 16 goals. To our credit, we stuck with it and probably broke even, if not beating them in that last quarter.

"Hopefully our supporters will see the positives out of the game – Robbie Gray did a fantastic job in the midfield, and Alipate Carlile is turning into one of the best fullbacks in the competition, keeping Cam Mooney goalless.

"So that does show that we're heading in the right direction."

Another area of work that Salopek says has flowed from the training track into match day is their work at the contested ball. The Power were beaten marginally by the Cats 49-41 in hard-ball gets, and Salopek – who had a team-high four hard-ball gets in his team-high 32 possessions – said the team would continue to focus on that area of the game back at Alberton.

"I think we'll be working on our contested ball – we worked on that a lot last week as well. We obviously still need to work on that particular area, but in saying that, I thought we were much better with that again today."