AFTER carrying plenty of momentum into quarter time, Port Adelaide was stunned by a late flurry of opposition goals and trails at half time after an inconsistent and turnover-riddled start...
If the Power’s first half of season 2015 was condensed into a single game, the report at the long break would read something like that, such has been the challenging start to Port Adelaide’s current campaign.
Few expected Port Adelaide to be battling in 12th place at this point of the season, but there it is, locked on points with fellow 2014 preliminary finallist North Melbourne and starting down a tough challenge against the Swans to kick off its second half on Thursday night.
Inconsistency has been the theme of the Power’s 2015; so far it has at least been consistent at that.
Toughed-out wins against Hawthorn, North and Adelaide, as well as fellow mid-pack clubs Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs have kept the Power in touch with the eight, but inexcusable losses to low-ranked sides Carlton and Brisbane have stymied the progress built by those wins.
With 10 games left to play, the Power sits two wins out of the top eight, but that isn’t the concern.
The worry for Port is when it will string together four quarters of quality ‘Port Adelaide brand’ footy.
It hasn’t happened this year, at all. Arguably the closest to that brand Port has played was against Fremantle at Domain Stadium in Round 1 – and that was a loss!
For Ken Hinkley, 2015 has been a challenge, but this patchy form has been seen before. The solution, however, is as complex as it is simple.
We sat down with Ken to pick his brain on the year so far, and what the Power needs to do so its season can be turned around…
Q: At the beginning of 2015, you said a blanket could be thrown over positions 3 to 12 on the ladder. Many would have said Port Adelaide would be closer to third than twelfth though. What’s been behind this up-and-down first half of the year?
Hinkley: The consistency of our game has just not been there and we’ve got results that, rightly so, we should’ve got, because we haven’t been consistent. When you talk about the evenness of the competition, it’s such that if you know that you’re off, the 3-12 becomes real, and we’re dealing with the ‘real’ right now.
We’ve been a little bit off all season, played patches of football that we would say we were reasonably happy with, but we’ve been more consistent with the inconsistent. That’s not the way to be a good football team.
Q: Port wasn’t expected to lose to Brisbane and Carlton. Do those performances come down to internal belief, or lack of it, or something else?
Hinkley: We fuel their [opposition] belief by our own performance. What we’ve done is given their flame some life, they’ve taken the opportunity, and we haven’t handled it as well as we needed to.
If you’re going to be any good as a football club, you need to handle those situations better. We haven’t this year.
Q: Port strung three wins together – North, Hawks, Crows – and played good footy in those games, but as you say, there were inconsistencies in those performances. Where does the ‘off’ you talk about come from? Is it just the way the Power is this year?
Hinkley: We use the Hawthorn game as an example here – it’s our season.
We played one of the most blistering quarters of football you’ll see, which gives you great hope that is the ability we’ve got in this team when we can get it right. But then we get dominated in the last three quarters and hang on by a very small margin to, as I said at that time, dodge a bullet.
The opposition entries in our back half told me we weren’t playing great footy then. We’ve since manufactured some wins by just grinding it out. We probably got through those three games and thought ‘Wow, we got through that, but now we just need to get everything else going’.
We then come up against a very much improved West Coast and paid a price. We just haven’t been good enough.
Q: How have things like injuries played into it, if at all?
Hinkley: We’ve had a few this year, but no more than any other team. I never use injuries as an excuse because you have them every year in AFL football. If you’re going to be a team that worries about injuries, you’ll be a team that worries about umpiring decisions, you’ll worry about things you can’t control.
Start doing that, you’re not going to get anywhere. We’re not going to be that club.
Q: The one thing you can control with injuries is who comes in to replace your injured players. How does the performance of the SANFL team this year impact at AFL level?
Hinkley: I think the Magpies have been a little bit like the Power, and that’s partly because we’ve kept making changes at AFL level. Last year it was harder to get into our AFL team than it’s been this year, because of our performance - you could see the standard you needed to play to get into our AFL team.
Right now, there’s been a little blurring of how you can get into the AFL team, and that’s caused us to play the way we are at both levels.
Q: So how does it turn around in the second half of the year and what are you looking for to show that turnaround? Is it wins, or simply the Port style returning to the game?
Hinkley: I think we know there’s a look to the way Port plays, and that’s the key thing. People who watch Port recognise what it looks like - or is supposed to look like - probably more than we do ourselves.
We’re second-guessing ourselves too much, and everyone who loves watching us play – our supporters, members, fans from other clubs - recognise this isn’t what Port plays like. They are very smart people.
Our responsibility as a club in the second half of the year is to try and give them the opportunities to see what they recognise as ‘Port football’. They will clearly identify it as soon as they see it, and our team will be much better for giving that display consistently.
Q: What are some of the things you are looking for?
Hinkley: There’s a hardness about the way we play Port Adelaide football, there’s an aggressiveness about the way we go about it and there’s a determination about the way we play every minute, of every game.
There was a catchphrase from the last two years that we don’t give up. I don’t think we’ve lived that anywhere near as well as we need to. The boys know they haven’t played the football they should deliver, and they’ve accepted an ownership over the need to deliver it.
Q: How do they deliver on that though? Clearly it’s not as simple as flicking a switch.
Hinkley: They know what’s missing, they can see the same things missing when they watch our games. They’re trying to deliver those things, but they can’t quite, in their own space at the moment, work out how to do that. My responsibility as a coach is to help them make it work.
We give them a consistent and strong message. That’s what we’ve got to deliver as coaches, and they’ve got to deliver a consistent and strong performance.
As soon as you try to fracture away from that process and change everything, you can be worse off than the current situation, which is hard to believe at the moment.
Q: Spectators – be they coaches, supporters, media, TV viewers at home - see the game and everything that’s happening on the field from an elevated position. It’s much harder to see everything at ground level as a player. How difficult is it to produce a game plan and style on the field consistently?
Hinkley: AFL football is hard to play. You’ve got to be an elite talent, and elite sportsman, a great physical specimen, brave and tough and, most importantly, you’ve got to think under pressure.
The biggest challenge facing AFL players is the ability to think clearly under real pressure. It’s a unique, 360-degree game we play, with the ferociousness of your opponent attacking you and the ball.
But you’ve got to learn to deal with it, and do it together as a team. Anyone who’s watched our games this year will know it’s that part missing. I’ve seen it. They know the parts the need to deliver, but the connection is crucial to success.
I’ve said all year in press conferences that our connection hasn’t been quite right. Do we understand what it is? Well I can show them what it looks like, but translating it on-field is the bit we’re struggling to get right.
Q: Is that the ‘team care’ you talk about?
Hinkley: The connection is all about the team. It’s not just one player getting the ball and doing it all himself. He has to give it to a teammate in a better position without hesitation. When you start to lose your form, you hesitate. Once you start to hesitate, that gap in form grows.
That’s what we’ve done – lost trust through hesitation - we need to get back to being instinctive and then that trust will come back.
Q: With a season that’s been inconsistent, there will be positives and negatives. We’ve done the negatives, what are some of your positives though?
Hinkley: Brendon Ah Chee and Karl Amon have debuted. Sam Colquhoun and Tom Clurey have come back and played some more games. So we’ve had opportunities to give games to those boys. We’ve actually uncovered some great stories like Ah Chee. When you consider how far back he was coming from, it goes to show that sometimes you’ve got to hang tough. Sometimes it won’t look great, but if you’ve got belief, a player can get to where he needs to be.
We’ve played some positive parts this season, for me the greatest positives have been the ability of our fans to keep turning up. For me that says, as a club, we’re sticking together, and that’s a real positive. Hopefully in the second half of the season, we can give them some more reasons to continue to stay.
Q: The litmus test starts with Sydney in Sydney, Collingwood and the Crows here, it’s a tough trial by fire to get things underway. What does it look like for you?
Hinkley: I’ll cut you off and say that I’m just looking ahead to Sydney. My job is to not get ahead of myself, to not think ahead and deal in hypotheticals. I just want to make sure that the effort is there and that the Port Adelaide Football Club stands for something on Thursday night.
Q: And that is that people will see Port Adelaide football?
Hinkley: It’s that they recognise the way we play. We want to be recognisable to our own standards. It doesn’t guarantee win or loss, but we do want to be recognisable to our own standards.
Other midyear reviews
HOCKING: SANFL mid-year review
MIDS: Carr and Surjan's reviews
FORWARDS: Edwards and Hentschel's reviews
