With injuries to key players at a scale Port Adelaide has rarely seen and a tough follow up to the bye, Power coach Matthew Primus is optimistic that his squad has the depth and fitness to respond in the second half of the season.

Port Adelaide sits fourteenth on the ladder with four wins and eight losses.

Those wins - in the opening round against St Kilda and then a hat trick against North Melbourne, Gold Coast and Carlton - have already eclipsed the three it took during its worst AFL season in 2011.

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Primus however remains disappointed at the way in which his club has entered the mid-season bye, with poor performances against Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs halting the momentum it built over the preceding three weeks.

“I was most disappointed with how we played on Sunday, I thought it was our worst performance for the year,” said Primus on Wednesday.

“We’ve improved, we’ve been more competitive but I still thought there was opportunities where we could’ve had two or three more wins and we haven’t got them.

“It’s not as good as I would’ve hoped and the players certainly aren’t as rapt in it as what we could’ve been.”

The second year senior coach has called on his squad to rally in the face of a tough fixture and mounting injuries through the second half of the season and wants to find new players to fill the void left by key players.

Leading lights Jay Schulz, Hamish Hartlett, Jackson Trengove, Matt Thomas will not return until early July, whilst Travis Boak’s recovery from foot surgery will determine whether he can jump back into the side straight away against the Crows at the same time.

The role of filling the shoes of those first-choice players will fall to a tier of developing and re-skilled players who will get an opportunity to put their hand up against Geelong, Adelaide and Essendon after the bye.

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“We got to get back to the style of footy that we played consistently for a while there,” said Primus.

“We realise that we’ve got a pretty tough start after the bye and its going to be a great challenge for us with a few out - we’ll find some people to step up - and we look forward to really delving into our list to see who’s going to stand up in tough circumstances.”

The absence of five key players will make Port’s challenge against Geelong even more significant, but Primus expects that new faces in the Power side will create as much a challenge for the Power’s opponents as the club itself.

“It’s an unknown, we think there’s no reason why we can’t play better footy than what we have in the first half,” said Primus.

“We’ll set ourselves up for that.

“They’ll [the playing group] come back in four or five days - mentally and physically - and we’ll attack it like we attacked the first half of the season.

“I’d hope we’d get greater reward than we did in the first half.”

The Power plays Geelong at Simonds Stadium after the bye, followed by home games against Adelaide, Essendon and an away game against Melbourne in Darwin.