One of the traits of a good team is that they can play badly and still win. For two and a half quarters Port Adelaide were decidedly poor.
A team that looked clueless. There is very little point in looking back, but if the Eagles had kicked straight then the Power would be waking up to very different headlines today.
This game was rightly billed as the first big test of Ken Hinckley’s new look team, despite the fact that Adelaide finished top four in 2012.
The showdown is not like other games and the form book is usually burned, the ashes locked in a box, encased in concrete and dropped into the sea.
It looked like the test was a step too far and the Port bubble was about to burst. The skills and the running spread from the back half was non-existent and the Eagles managed to curtail the dangerous Justin Westhoff.
Nothing seemed to work for Port Adelaide and West Coast managed to free players up, allowing Waters to roam around the back half.
Josh Kennedy may want to update his deodorant as nobody in black came within a bull’s roar of him in the opening stages of the game, allowing him to shuffle step his way to three goals in the opening term.
You could almost hear the sharpening of tongues as Port Adelaide were finally living up to the pre-season hype that had surrounded them.
After a half of football, which yielded only two goals and saw the old demons start to show their faces. West Coast utterly destroyed Port in every facet of the game, dominating all areas of the game, the Eagles stretched out to a 41-point lead.
A promise was made at the beginning of the new era at Alberton that Port Adelaide would never give in.
The players have taken this to heart, the emotion of a milestone game aside this is a team that doesn’t stop – ever.
Port fans are getting a new familiar feeling, a feeling that when Hinckley’s men start to get a run on, it takes a hell of a lot to peg them back.
Forty-one points is a big turnaround by anyone’s standards. By the standards of Port Adelaide vintage 2012 it would have been impossible.
A lot has been said about the fitness of the boys from Alberton, one of the youngest teams in the AFL ends games like a tsunami of humanity. West Coast looked stunned. At the final break Ken Hinckley gave impassioned instructions to Kane Cornes and Hamish Hartlett.
Travis Boak lifted, Jake Neade ran amok. The result was Port running over the top of John Worsfold’s coaching career and holding on for a five point win.
Kane Cornes celebrated 250 appearances for the Power with a goal, which will stay in the memory for a long time. The image of the younger Cornes, arms raised with the Port Adelaide faithful celebrating in the background is a moment which makes sport the glorious spectacle that it is.
The Power managed to pass their sternest examination yet without either of the key forwards troubling the scorer. It was an example of the new determination at Alberton.
As far as performances go it was without question the worst of the fledgling season, but there are no pictures in scorebooks, the only important thing is the four points.
Port Adelaide will travel to Tasmania next weekend for their next test. The questions will start again, and the coaching group will quietly go about their business and prepare for North Melbourne, the next pin waiting to burst the Alberton bubble.
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