PORT ADELAIDE coach Matthew Primus has praised his team’s ability to “win ugly”, following the thrilling one-point win over West Coast at AAMI Stadium on Saturday night.

PTV: Primus Post Game

The Power seemed to have the game won, leading by 23 points early in the final term, but the Eagles piled on four unanswered goals to level the scores with a few minutes to play.

The visitors had several opportunities to snatch an unlikely victory, but failed to register a score and a scrambled point to David Rodan was enough to secure the win for Port Adelaide.

Skill errors reached comical proportions in the blustery conditions, but Primus said the narrow win was still a good response to the Power’s 94-point defeat at the hands of St Kilda last weekend.

“It won’t go down as one of the greatest games ever played,” he said after the game.

“We would have liked to have played a bit better, but that had a fair bit to do with how the oppo [opposition] played. It wasn’t a great game, but the players stuck at it.

“When you get to the end of the year you just remember the wins and losses - you don’t remember how you did it, so it’s good to have one and it’ll be a lot better week than it would’ve been if it had gone the other way.”

Primus said his side had been guilty of over-possessing the ball in the first half and added that he thought a number of the team’s younger players had gone missing at times.

“I thought a few players had moments where they just drifted out of the game and that allowed West Coast to get back in. It definitely felt like we were dominating stats-wise, but we were only ever one or two goals ahead of them. I thought we should have got more reward for our hard work,” he said.

“We’ve got a lot of young kids that have been up for four or five weeks and we’ve played some pretty good opposition, so there’s a bit of that. It’s a great lesson to learn and they were able to win ugly.”

Primus said he expected those same young players to help take the club to its next premiership, but that it would take time for them to become a hardened AFL team.

“I think we’ve got a lot of talent on our list and a lot of young talent. I just think we need to get a lot of games into them,” he said.

“A lot of them are 19-, 20-, 21-, 22- or 23-years-old and need another 50, 60 or 70 games, before they are a really experienced and hardened group. All those clubs [Geelong, St Kilda, Collingwood and the Western Bulldogs] have had to play a lot of games together before they’re up there, so it’s about how quickly we as a coaching group can speed up their development and how many times we can keep them out on the park to play game after game.”