PORT Adelaide coach Matthew Primus says he took plenty of positives out of the Power's opening NAB Cup games at AAMI Stadium on Sunday.
Port fell agonisingly short of coming away with a pair of wins - beating Carlton but losing a thriller to the Crows - and Primus was upbeat after the two contests.
"I thought a lot of the things we've been working on over the pre-season shone through for us to an extent," Primus said.
"Our stoppage stuff was good, I thought some of our patterns and some of the stuff we did off the ball to try and defend our inside-50s and hold the ball in our forward half was working ok.
"We got through unscathed and it was a good start for us."
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Meanwhile, his Carlton counterpart, Brett Ratten, was largely unfazed by his team's indifferent start which saw the Blues return home winless after going down in tight tussles with Port and the Crows.
Ratten's men suffered a six-point loss to the Power in the first game of the triple-header at AAMI Stadium and then went down to Adelaide by nine points in the second.
Carlton was in winning positions in both games and while Ratten was happy to use the experience as a teaching tool for some of his younger players, he admitted the poor start against the Power had displeased him.
"We weren't switched on at all," Ratten said.
"It was like we were coming out for a training session and we weren't switched on at all.
"Defensively we were really poor and we should maybe have been five or six goals down, which wasn't the way that we wanted to start 2012.
"We want to make sure that our performance is to a level that we expect and there's no doubt in the first game that it wasn't, whether we played the kids or the older players."
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Ratten left a host of first-choice players - including Chris Judd, Michael Jamison, Jarrad Waite and Andrew Walker - in Melbourne, which allowed the coach to evaluate some of his more inexperienced players.
"We found out that [Dylan] Buckley has got a real future, Frazer Dale showed some promise and [Josh] Bootsma probably struggled a bit in the first one but played alright in the second game," he said.
"We've really found this is a great teaching tool for the kids and we'll use it as a reference point [for them] throughout the season in their quest to play AFL football."
While Ratten was a tad disappointed with his charges, the triple-header provided new Adelaide coach Brenton Sanderson with a perfect start to his coaching tenure at West Lakes.
"The most impressive thing for me was that the boys found a way to win having come from behind in both matches," Sanderson said.
Several Crows attempted torpedo punts on the day, a risky tactic frowned upon by previous coach Neil Craig, and Sanderson said it was a deliberate ploy that was part of a new philosophy at the club.
"It was something that we thought we might be able to catch the opposition off guard with," he said.
"The defensive press is so aggressive in the modern game now so there's some opportunities to attack the last line.
"I think you'll see that a lot more [of that] in the modern game these days.
"Long kicking to a contest is back. We've done a lot of contested marking work and pressure work over the summer and it was nice to see a few of those things work out for us today."
Due to hot conditions, Sunday's matches were shortened and the interchange benches extended under the AFL's extreme heat policy, which all three coaches agreed had helped alleviate the strain on their players.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
