PORT Adelaide captain Dom Cassisi has praised coach Matthew Primus’ decision to blood youngsters in 2011, saying it is the critical reason for the Power’s upturn in fortunes on the football field.
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After what many saw as a horror year in 2011 when the Power narrowly missed finishing bottom of the ladder, Port Adelaide sits at 4-6 after ten rounds this year, with ample showings of competitiveness against several premiership favourites.
Cassisi says that the club’s coaching panel has taken the right path in player development and that the squad is at a stage where maturity will occur quickly.
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“This year, without doubt we’ve seen a lot of improvement, we haven’t been turning them into wins early in the year, but the path we’re going down is the right one and our players are developing pretty quickly now,” said Cassisi.
“I think what we’re seeing now is the fruits of what we’ve put in - I guess the benefits of what we’ve been doing over the last 18 months.”
The Port Adelaide veteran believes that the decision to play young and inexperienced players in 2011 has reaped rewards in the current season - and that no “magic formula” in the last month has been responsible for the Power’s turnaround.
“Matty [Primus] went down the path last year of getting games into young guys - guys like Broadby [Matthew Broadbent] and Benny Jacobs - he persisted with them and now we’re starting to see the benefits of that, it hasn’t been in the making for the last two or three weeks.”
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“It takes time to turn your list around… and Matty should be getting a fair bit of credit for it because he went down a path last year, which wasn’t the easy path… I think he just had a clear-cut path of how he could turn this place around and like I say we have a lot of hard work ahead of us.
“Early on [this year] we weren’t getting the wins…internally we knew we were going to be turning things around but full credit to the playing group and the coaching staff.
“Matty hasn’t waived one bit he’s just been consistent with our game plan, consistent with wanting us to carry out his instructions on game day and I think the last three weeks we’ve been able to show, in particular on the weekend for four quarters, that’s the style of football we want to play and when we can adhere to it for four quarters we’re more than competitive.”
Port Adelaide plays Hawthorn on Sunday 10 June at 4.10pm at AAMI Stadium.
