NEW POWER chief executive Mark Haysman (Haysie) and coach Mark Williams (Choco) spent an hour in the FiveAA studio on Friday night dealing with all the issues that have surrounded the club of late in a wide-ranging interview with KG and Cornesy.

If you missed it, here’s a run down of a lot of what was said…

On John James comments in the Advertiser about AAMI Stadium
HAYSIE: Yeah that was a good week to still be on holidays actually! When they rang me I hadn’t seen the papers, I was still making weet-bix for the boys at that stage! That was unfortunate, we’re working hard with the guys at the SANFL on getting a better set-up at AAMI Stadium and a better (financial) stadium deal for us as well and we’re working with them on that and we’re committed to that.

On media criticism, and Michelangelo Rucci
CHOCO: I get on terrifically well with 95 percent of the media, I have a fantastic relationship. I spend a lot of time in Melbourne with the Victorian media. Something like Before the Game the night before the Grand Final gives me an opportunity to show my personality which most people don’t get to see it much. Whatever happens, happens, we move on. Being a kid of a football coach, I’ve seen it before.

CHOCO: I can’t write the press, other people do it. There’s always an opportunity for someone else to have the last say so in the end I think most people out there know what’s going on and they give me fantastic support.

HAYSIE: It’s been a difficult year on-field for the club and at Port Adelaide we exist to win premierships down there, there’s no question. Our fans are amongst the most passionate in the land, that’s what they expect and there’s no doubt about that. I think there’s a bit of flak that Mark has copped in the back half of the year especially which I don’t think is fair to be quite frank. The club took a decision after Round 13 which has been talked about quite widely to focus on the long-term. The interesting thing there is it wasn’t Mark’s decision. It was a club decision that was taken and Mark was the spokesman for that decision. The club in fairness possibly should have come out and made that point earlier. Since that point in time, right up until today he has been copping an enormous amount of criticism for that. Calling the season off at that point, whichever words you want to use, may well have been the wrong thing to do for our supporters but that was the club’s call and Mark put the word out there and has been criticised in some sections unfairly I think as a result of that.

HAYSIE: (Michelangelo) is there to do his job. He’s obviously respected in Adelaide media circles and footy circles and his job is to put his opinion across and he’s entitled to do that. We’re not always going to agree with that. But I think there’s been a couple of instances where Mark has taken some significant criticism unfairly for a club decision. We’re very fortunate, Mark is one of the most successful AFL coaches going around, one of six premiership coaches in the system at the moment and he’s always had the club’s best interests at heart and that sometimes gets lost in the mix.

CHOCO: The criticisms that I understand to be not based on fact are more hurting to my family than anything else. I am a protective beast if you like.

HAYSIE: There has (been attempts to resolve issues). Michelangelo and I have caught up and had some lunch and we’ve had a chat. We’re working through that, he knows where we’re coming from, and we had a good open dialogue and we look forward to working with him to create a better working relationship going forward. One thing that’s really important with me in the chair now is for me to provide a higher level of support to Mark and for him to not always be the person that’s out there. Him and Rohdey do a terrific job and it’d be nice for me to take a bit of pressure off those guys I think.

On staff departing (because of Mark Williams)
HAYSIE: That’s not correct. Previously having been at West End as a sponsor, we worked closely with the club then and these people that left are good operators who have moved on to bigger and better things, there’s no doubt about that. I think any business should be trying to grow and develop their people to move onto bigger roles whether it’s within their organisation or outside.

CHOCO: Phil Walsh and I had a fantastic relationship for 25 years, we worked head to head for ten years, we’re very demanding, we’re very professional, we work really hard and in the end we had probably worn each other out and that’s the truth. I’m not sure if you can work with your mates for ten years in a row. I love their family, I love him, and I love Meredith his wife and we’ll be friends forever. He’s gone over to West Coast now and good luck to him. The times we had at Port we have developed our players and our club and got some great successes together. Apart from Phil I have no anxiety about the people leaving the club at all, none, and I would say 99.9 percent of them are going to jobs where they’re paid more.

CHOCO: We’ve had a couple of recent coaching staff who are on contract take jobs where they think there’s better opportunities. Daniel Healy came and sat with me and he wants to be an AFL senior coach and he thinks being in charge of his own side gets him a better lead into it. That was his view and I don’t want to stand in the way of someone who wants to go down that path but for our club we invested time and money to employ him and up-skill him in the development area, and its really disappointing. Now we have to go and find someone else and they’re not easy to find and it takes time before they catch up on the knowledge and the relationship with those young players as well.

CHOCO: (Head Fitness Coach) Darren Burgess left (in January) to go to the Socceroos, we talk almost every week, we’re very good friends. It was a life long dream for him. He sends back photos of himself with Tim Cahill, Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell, he’s living every minute of it himself as a fan of soccer. He put in the program but for us to try to get a top level experienced AFL fitness coach in January is just impossible because they’re all in their jobs. We were very lucky to get Dan Comerford, he came to us from Collingwood and brought some innovation to our club. But really the management with players and relationship building takes some time and when you come in in January and games are about to start it’s really difficult for the guy. I thought he did a terrific job for the time that he was there. I helped him and rang Gubby Allen and he’s got a job with Michael Voss (at the Brisbane Lions) now. Quality people stay in the system and good luck to him.

On game-plan, and statistics
CHOCO: It became apparent we gave away too many free kicks at stoppage and the opposition scored way over the top from stoppage which is usually one of our key, main scoring avenues so we looked at that and we looked at how we might be able to man up a little quicker from those stoppages. If you look at second half of the year, we got great results in that we didn’t get scored against that way so that was good for us.

CHOCO: One of the great things live radio does it gives your listeners the opportunity to make their own call on the stats I’m just about to lay on you… We don’t go inside 50 enough, so if Graham (Cornes) is talking about that, I 100 per cent agree. I agree. Someone can write that down if they want to and I agree with someone else’s criticisms, yes. But inside 50 we’re the 5th best at scoring when we go inside 50 and we’re the 5th best at kicking goals inside 50. So the structures and the movement inside 50, while it’s not the best, it’s right up there with the absolute best. We are certainly working at getting it inside 50 more but when it gets in there we’ve very efficient.

On attendances, ‘Live the Creed’ and Fos Williams
HAYSIE: Attendances are a big challenge, if it was easy to fix it would have been fixed by now. There have been some good people at the club over many years. There are a number of initiatives we are working on through our membership, and through marketing and communications as well and now we have the draw we can really work hard on that. Enhancing the match experience is important and it’s becoming a bit clichéd but connecting with your supporters is really important to do so we’re looking at ways we can do that as well that work for Port Adelaide. The other is playing the right style of footy and winning some games and if we can do that early that will really help.

HAYSIE: Live the Creed is an important stage for us now to go through now. One thing the club hasn’t done particularly well is choose whether it is trying to engage with its traditional heartland supporter or the new supporter and maybe we’ve tried to do both. The creed really is about the values that any club would love to stand for. They’re values that come out of the history of the Port Adelaide Football Club and we’re proud to have that there. It’s really about saying that’s what the club stands for, and not a whole lot more than that, we don’t want to overplay it but we need to be true to that in how we behave week-in, week-out, on and off the field. It’s about how we operate and that’s what we want it to stand for. It’s not really about going back to our history, it’s about respecting where we’ve come from.

CHOCO: (The Creed) sits in the background. Never once did Dad read it out to us or quote it to us when we went to sleep at night time, believe me. I think it’s great recognition. Our people come from all over Australia to play for us and it’s nice to think that they understand where the club began. We as a club move forward on everything but the work ethics and the points behind the Creed still stand today without any doubt. Making personal sacrifice and really working hard is what we talk about.

CHOCO: I’m probably the proudest kid around, with Stephen and Jenny. to have Fos as my father. There’s never been any ‘gee that’s hard to work with’, it’s always been inspirational and I’ll take it that way until the day I die. He was a perfectionist though, he really strove to make the club and at home he really tried to make us as good as we could ever be. It was fantastic as far as giving us a fantastic role model and example.

On the draft
CHOCO: I know people are anticipating that I probably had holidays but I haven’t had one day off – I’ve been pretty busy – I watched 17 games after the season, sometimes I’d go to Melbourne and watch double headers of the U18s on Saturday and Sunday. Peter Rohde and Geoff Parker and our national recruiting manager in Blair Hartley were spending the last three days in Adelaide going through where they think the order is at the minute and it was great for me to be able to go in there and know who the players are. When you play in a Grand Final like the previous year, it’s quite difficult, you know some of the players, but I’d probably know 50 which is quite handy.

CHOCO: All we can do is prepare our order if its (Nick) Naitanui first or it its (Daniel) Rich first or if its (Jack) Watts first, and say well if any of those come through (to pick four), we’ll take one of those.

CHOCO: I spoke to him (Josh Carr) yesterday, he’s coming back to Adelaide on Sunday and I anticipate he’ll be training before too long at the club. If someone picks him before us (he won’t play here) but we’ll see what happens.

Looking back on last season and looking ahead
CHOCO: When we all agreed that it was impossible to make the finals, we had won four games and lost nine including our last three, so we said ‘well lets give these other blokes an opportunity to see if they’ll stay on our list’. So we put quite a few of those guys back into our team and in the end it gave us a pretty strong certainty that ‘no, they’re not the ones we want to go with’. We then put five or six young guys in – Mitch Farmer, Marlon Motlop, Nick Salter, Ryan Williams, Matt Westhoff, they got chances as well, so we thought ‘gee we mightn’t have got the results we definitely wanted in the second half of the year but we learnt a lot about delisting players and certainly the ones we wanted to keep too’.

CHOCO: If you take a 90+ points scoring game and say ‘yeah that’s not bad’, in 2007 we had 15 times scoring 90 points, 2008 we had 13 times. We lost nine games by 20 points or less. Chad had half a year and got injured, Shaun was injured at the start and then got suspended. We’re not whinging about what happened, we’re saying the glass is half full.

CHOCO: Everything was stacked against us in Round 22 – we win and Adelaide can get fourth, (we miss out on pick 3 in the draft), we were playing at the MCG for the first time since we got beaten by 20 goals in the Grand Final. Everyone was anticipating Port had put the cue in the rack and people are accusing us of tanking. After Round 13 we tried, we planned, we worked hard. So we’re playing a team (North Melbourne) playing for a top four spot and we get out there and beat them by 12 goals. I can guarantee from the last couple of games there’s a lot of enthusiasm, the coaches are right into it, we just can’t wait for the season to start and we can’t wait for our supporters to jump on board like they did after the 2006 year to come and watch some of the exciting young players develop on our list. You saw Travis Boak and Salopek is back and training well, it’s just going to be a great year for us.

CHOCO: I’m a coach, I look forward to coaching. I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm about our group. I know we’re not allowed to bet but if you were a betting person you’d be saving your money on the Melbourne Cup and doubling up on us I reckon.

GRAHAM CORNES: If there was dissatisfaction in the ranks, if players weren’t happy, if there was serious concern about the direction of the club you would think the father of two players at the club would hear something (but) not a whisper. They might come back and talk about the way you played and argue about it but in terms of dissatisfaction of the club or coaching staff, or the way things are going, not a hint.

CHOCO: Every player I can guarantee was dissatisfied about being in the position they were but gee they rolled their sleeves up and stuck with it. We know how we enjoy the great times having been through the hard times. The leadership of the club, the young players with their minds around developing their leadership as well, it’s all going to hold us in good stead come next year.