At the start of this season, I remember being impressed about how much Port Adelaide had improved over the course of six months. Things were looking up.
After they avoided the wooden spoon by beating Melbourne at Adelaide Oval in Round 24 last year, the Power started the year in good fashion.
They put in a good showing in their pre-season games, and after their round one victory over St Kilda, it appeared some spirit had been restored at Alberton.
Their continual improvement in ‘honourable losses’ had people impressed with their form and spelt a likely climb up the ladder from last year.
But over the last couple of weeks, their form has tapered. As a result, coach Matthew Primus has been unfairly bashed around in the media.
Port Adelaide now sit 15th on the ladder with one win and six losses, and this season already seems done and dusted.
They haven’t suffered any blow-outs – Sunday’s 40 point loss against Fremantle was the largest margin. However it’s how they’ve lost their games which is the major cause for concern.
Forget about Matthew Primus being a poor coach. The losses come down to the players. Even if Mick Malthouse or Paul Roos came over to coach the Power, this still wouldn’t be an A-grade side.
There are many problems with the playing group and football department at Port, but I’ve narrowed the sources of their problems down to three major things.
The first is depth. Port Adelaide’s best 18 are definitely in the top half of the competition. After that, the rest of their list isn’t yet up to AFL standard.
In such an elite competition, other sides will convincingly beat the weaker sides as a result of direct acts from the less experienced players.
The second is a lack of faith between players and the match committee. If players are poor, a stint in the seconds may give them a kick in the backside and start them firing. But the match committee’s constant chopping and changing of the side doesn’t help a team gel.
Players start to feel pressured and what follows are desperate performances to stay in the side, which leads to selfish acts.
The third is their standard of skills. Players like Travis Boak, Hamish Hartlett and Brad Ebert are in the top 50 players in the competition, but their ball use was very poor against Fremantle. These players must fire if Port are to improve on a disastrous 2011.
The rest of the team’s basic skills were at such a low ebb, they’d be lucky to break into a league team in the South Australian countryside.
Things like kicking and handballing are the most basic skills in AFL football. The players get paid to be not only proficient, but excellent at these basic tasks. It is their job.
If you are an accountant and you continually screw up the books for a client, you won’t keep your job. That’s the way it is in any profession.
Even worse is that Port Adelaide have 37,000 members. That’s 37,000 people who spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year to see poor performances most weeks. How there are even a couple of thousand people willing to dish out their hard-earned to support such an underperforming club completely perplexes me.
It spells true dedication. And their supporters deserve so much better.
I’m a bit of a FIFA 12 nut on the PlayStation. If my team loses, the onus is on me. I have full control over my players and their actions. Matty Primus doesn’t.
He can implement strategies and formations that most certainly have an impact on a team. But if the players don’t perform and can’t follow game plans, then this is the players’ fault.
The bottom line is this: Matty Primus isn’t the greatest coach of all time. He’s in the developmental stage at his craft just like the majority of his players are. If you start pulling apart the coach, then you must do the same to the young guys.
But boorish statements from quasi-knowledgeable football people do nothing to dispel the notion that the coach is solely to blame. And those people are just plain wrong.
The problem lies with the players, and their need for improvement. Any coach needs time to try to create that improvement.
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We’re taking a look at one player from each team that needs to make a difference this week, starting with the ANZAC Day games.
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