Choco post-game - Round 2
Power coach Mark Williams reinforced his belief in his young playing group, despite the team’s big loss to the Swans at the SCG. Here’s what he has to say.
First of all, all credit to the Swans, they were fantastic today. I watched them last week and they kicked six goals for the game, to kick 22 and double our score was something we certainly didn’t see, so Roosey has got them working well, so well done mate.
I thought probably for three quarters we were competitive. The third quarter was terrible. It looked like boys versus men out there and certainly we didn’t see too much.
Shaun Burgoyne played pretty well. Warren had his chances – I thought he was our most dangerous forward – he missed a few goals that he probably should have kicked. And Kane Cornes did a terrific job on Kennelly I thought. Apart from that there weren’t too many good things that happened for the day.
I suppose if you come and watch us train, you would see that we do a lot of tackling and we do a lot of scramble after the ball, and try and win stoppages but it didn’t come out at all today in the play, but we will certainly keep doing it that way.
How do you explain that Mark, the lack of pressure and the fact that you were beaten for the contested ball so easily?
I explain it because Sydney are pretty good at it. They’ve been playing that way for a long long time. Prior to this game we’d talked about the fact that that was going to be the situation. There was a lot of 50-50, continued, bumbled around, everyone after it, everyone after it, I thought we kept going at it quite well a lot of times, but in the end they kept at it. I thought their persistence was the thing that was the key to it.
You must have thought that you were right in it at half-time?
There’s no doubt. I think Warren missed two goals just before half-time which would have had us maybe one goal down, and they were walk-in goals that most people would have kicked. Walking into this room there was a degree of optimism, it certainly wasn’t pessimism, and as a coaching group we were trying to make it more difficult of the opposition, every time they went inside-50 they marked the ball, we tried to do that, and then we tried one of everything in the third quarter and nothing seemed to work. We look back even on the grand final and we didn’t flood, well we even flooded in the third quarter and we didn’t get a result there. You always look back and then maybe I should have, but most of the ideas came rolling out through the third quarter without much result.
Having a little bit more time to talk to them at three-quarter time, we saw that the players re-grouped and were in the game in the last quarter, which was at least good, we probably lost the last quarter by one goal instead of being 10 goals down at three-quarter time.
I know Geelong is one of the best sides we’ve seen for some time, but that’s three games in a row you’ve been pummelled in the centre square with the contested footy against Geelong and Sydney. How much of a concern is that as far as going forward is concerned for Port Adelaide?
No doubt it’s a concern. I think grand final day we might have won the stoppages actually, so I’m not sure if you can just go by that. But the ability for the opposition to take the ball from the backline to the forward line without us touching it was a concern to us. Obviously the midfielders have to play better. We didn’t think anyone really played well and we will continue to work on it. Obviously next week is a huge game for us, we’re playing the Crows, certainly if we need something to get us up, that would be it, but we certainly can’t deliver that sort of stuff and expect to win. Obviously the Crows belted West Coast yesterday so they’ll be pretty confident.
How important is that game now to going 0 and 3?
It would be that if you lose it’s 0 and 3, and if you win it’s 1 and 2. I think for a couple of years in 2002 and 2003 we might have finished minor premiers losing the first two games, so we certainly haven’t lost the understanding it’s a long year. Our players that played particularly well and moved forward last year, we really haven’t seen much from them this year, so we need to get a more even spread from 15 or so players.
It’s very early days, but people have been a little bit critical of the Swans chances, writing them off, do you think they’ve been a bit too quick to be saying that sort of stuff?
I would suspect with the way the draw is, you probably need to wait 8 or 10 rounds before you’ve got much of an idea of what’s going on.
Do you make changes personnel wise or do you back these boys in?
We will consider who played well in the SANFL. No-one’s got a gold pass forever, but certainly the ones that are playing there (in today’s team) are the ones that have deserved their chance based on their performance in the pre-season and late last year.
It’s important that when you have a young group of players that you do show some confidence in them and believe in them. The coaching staff have worked extremely hard with the playing group to make sure they understand that we believe in them and at the same time players will look hard at themselves as we do as coaches, and if there’s anything we can do, we will talk about it and get on with it.