PORT ADELAIDE coach Ken Hinkley has lamented his side’s repeated skill errors and inside stoppage work after Sunday evening’s loss to Greater Western Sydney.
The Power fought back from 35 points down in the third quarter to close to within nine in the last term before the Giants found a way to halt the momentum.
The visitors were particularly impressive in the early stages with their ability to punish Port’s skill errors and turnovers, a fact not lost on Hinkley.
“We make it pretty hard, but there’s no fairy dust, you can’t sprinkle something on it,” he said in his post-match press conference.
“Like every
“We do an enormous amount of work on it, every session we work on ball use.”
“It’s the pressure of the game, when the pressure comes up you’ve got to be able to execute so we
Another deficiency noted by Hinkley was in the ruck where his side was beaten 57-30 in the hit-outs with Dawson Simpson dominant with 46 himself.
Hinkley rotated Charlie Dixon and Justin Westhoff through the ruck in the first half but then pushed Dixon to his customary forward position and allowed Dougal Howard, Ollie Wines and Brad Ebert to take on Simpson.
Hinkley said he might consider bringing in a ruckman from the SANFL side in the absence of Paddy Ryder.
“We tried a fair bit tonight and we still got beaten pretty comfortably but they have an absolute big fella in there,” Hinkley remarked.
“We'd like to see another ruckman come in and play, but we're battling with that a little bit.
"Maybe it's worth going for it because at the moment some of our challenges have been pretty clear.
"I'm not going to predict here tonight that we're going to change our rucks off the back of one game tonight because we were right in the game."
And while it was a key area where the Giants got on top, Hinkley said winning the hit-outs wasn’t the sole reason for the result.
Instead, he suggested some of the stoppage work in the midfield wasn’t good enough by his side.
"We've won games this year without a dominant ruck," Hinkley said.
"Some of our contest stuff in tight when you've got a losing ruck as bad as we did, we're allowing them to get too much free run at it.
"Some of our inside stoppage work needed to be a bit more brutal I would've thought
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