AFL Saturday Study: Unpacking ultimate Power failure, time for taggers to return as stars wreak havoc

The stat sheet from Port Adelaide’s clash with Hawthorn on Saturday night is one of the most extraordinary ever seen in the AFL.

The Power won the disposal count 416-342, had 12 more inside-50s and won clearances a staggering 54-30. They even had more tackles.

And yet they lost – by 64 points.

To be smashed by that much, let alone on their home turf against a Hawks outfit that came to Adelaide as rank underdogs, despite that level of statistical domination is a staggering indictment on coach Ken Hinkley’s game plan as much as it is his troops. Virtually everything the Power did on Saturday night played right into Sam Mitchell’s hands, whose tenure as coach of the club he claimed four premierships with as a player could not have started more swimmingly.

First, a note on Hawthorn, who were everything you could ask of a developing team and then some: disciplined defensively, hard-running in both directions, well drilled and efficient in everything they touched.

Time after time the Power were exposed on the counterattack as a nest of Hawks ran into open goals.

Just as they did against North Melbourne in Round 1, a threatening group of tall forwards – on this occasion, Jeremy Finlayson, Mitch Georgiades and Todd Marshall – were completely nullified by an unassuming but incredibly effective backline. Sam Frost has seldom looked a more trustworthy footballer than he has in two weeks under Mitchell’s tutelage, while James Sicily has slotted back seamlessly after 18 months on the sidelines.

Jack Scrimshaw’s kicking, particularly setting up attacks from outside the defensive 50, is likewise a joy to watch.

Up forward, too, the Hawks are suddenly packed to the rafters with options, from the canny Jack Gunston and Luke Breust who used all the wide open space the Power handed to them on a silver platter, to a spearhead in Mitch Lewis who, with five goals following a best-afield effort against the Roos, has officially broken out already.

They kicked thirteen goals straight from set shots, which in itself is absolutely phenomenal.

But while the Hawks were undoubtedly impressive, the story is clearly Port Adelaide. Impotent in attack, unwilling to work as hard as their opponents defensively when it was their turn, and utterly bereft of ideas on how to stop the rot, a club with the motto ‘We exist to win premierships’ is not going to take that performance well.

Stat of the night? The Hawks booted nine goals from scoring chains that started in their defensive 50; the Power managed two points. As far as I’ve been able to tell without access to the vaults beneath Champion Data, it’s the biggest discrepancy in almost six years.

Either Port’s backline was so ill-organised and at sea that they were waltzed through with merry abandon, or the lack of intent from their midfielders and forwards up the ground gave them no chance at all. Or both. It could be both.

“It just looked at some stages throughout the night they didn’t want to be there,” former Hawthorn great Jordan Lewis said of the Power on Fox Footy.

“They didn’t want to chase or put in the work defensively and arrest that momentum.”

The Power’s last game at the Adelaide Oval, their humiliating preliminary final loss to the Western Bulldogs, was ugly, but there their problem was simply getting their hands on the ball. Here, with 39 touches from Travis Boak, 38 from Karl Amon, 36 from Ollie Wines and 29 from Zak Butters before the most prolific Hawk (Tom Mitchell, naturally), their issue was literally everything else.

While Georgiades clunked the occasional mark, no one else looked a threat near goal, with the Power’s plan to bomb it in, cross their fingers and hope for the best manna from heaven for the Hawks.

The absence of Charlie Dixon was keenly felt, as much for his ability to crash the pack and open up space for ground-level crumbers as for his contested marking itself. Jeremy Finlayson, for all his attributes, is not an adequate replacement as a forward focal point, the former Giant going goalless and taking just two marks largely opposed to Hawks youngster Denver Grainger-Barras.

For Brad Johnson, one of modern football’s finest exponents of forward craft, the manner in which Port’s forwards attacked the ball was itself highly problematic.

“Port Adelaide’s forwards are all running back towards goal, no one is coming at the kicker,’ he noted.

“You need at least one or two to be crossing over, give that short option – then the guys that are running deep come right into play.”

The Power sit dead last on the ladder midway through the round, and thoroughly deserve it. For a side which has finished in the top two in consecutive years, it could not have been a more nightmarish start.

Tom Jonas of Port Adelaide leads his team off after their massive loss to Hawthorn. (Photo by Mark Brake/Getty Images)

Tagger time: Unchecked superstars run riot from Marvel to Metricon

If 10 seconds of play could encapsulate one and a half rounds of football, it did during the final quarter between Essendon and Brisbane at Marvel Stadium.

Deep in the Lions’ attacking 50, Zach Merrett sharks a tap, only to be instantly tackled and dispossessed by Jarrod Berry, who has stuck to the Bombers star like glue in the second half. The ball spills free, and Lachie Neale, the best man afield, has no one around to stop him snapping the game-sealing goal, his second for the evening.

The goal was emblematic of the two distinct approaches coaches Ben Rutten and Chris Fagan took to proceedings under the roof. The Bombers chose to back in their midfield stars, particularly Merrett and Darcy Parish, to beat out the Lions’, just as they’d done in a whirlwind first quarter in which they booted four goals to one. The Lions, meanwhile, opted to deploy Berry in a tagging role, one of the few we’ve seen thus far this season.

The result at the end was stark. Merrett, unstoppable in the first half with 21 disposals, would have just ten more after the break, as Berry clamped down hard. On the other side, Neale, who was left unchecked, would have 24, as well as kicking two vital goals.

Commentating on Fox Footy, former greats Nick Riewoldt and Garry Lyon were quick to acknowledge Berry’s performance, most particularly in the lead-up to Neale’s aforementioned sealing goal.

“What about the work of Berry – the hit goes to Merrett, and Berry’s hanging all over him,” Riewoldt said.

“He gets set the task at half time, Merrett’s running riot in the first half, and look at him here.

“He’s just disciplined to the role, all over him, ball spills loose – game over.”

“What you’ve got is someone that’s gone to a player and impacted to the point there’s a goal kicked,” Lyon added, questioning the Bombers’ choice to have Parish go head-to-head with Neale despite an impressive-looking stat line.

“This man’s [Neale] pretty much run around on his own. Darcy Parish has had 35 [disposals] himself, Lachie Neale’s had 38, Lachie’s kicked two goals one, Darcy’s missed two.

“Berry hasn’t absolutely taken Merrett out of the game, Merrett’s still had 31, but when it mattered most… accountability.”

The Bombers aren’t the first team to be ripped to shreds by one of the game’s premier on-ballers this season – after Patrick Dangerfield dominated against them in Round 1, it wasn’t even the first time it’s happened to them – and nor will they be the last. Gold Coast similarly had no answers for Christian Petracca on Saturday night at Metricon Stadium, as the Melbourne star followed up his 38-disposal, two-goal effort in Round 1 against the Western Bulldogs with another 40 against the Suns.

Going head-to-head with young bull Matt Rowell, the reigning Norm Smith Medallist won that duel in a knockout, Rowell well down on his brilliant best with just 19 disposals.

Interestingly, the Suns did employ a tagger for the evening – third-year wingman Jeremy Sharp seldom let hard-running Demon Ed Langdon out of his sight. Langdon’s run and carry was pivotal in the Dees’ run to the premiership last year, and in their opening round victory over the Dogs; while he still finished with 20 disposals, his metres gained dropped from 451 in Round 1 to just 291 on Sharp.

As a consequence, the Dees’ transitions often lacked their usual fluency and precision, regularly either trying to bite off high-risk kicks into the corridor or blast long down the line – in short, exactly what the Suns were going for, and a major reason why they ground out an honourable 13-point loss. Had they been able to clamp down on Petracca in a similar way to Langdon, things might have turned out even better for them.

The slow return of taggers in Round 2 has made for a stark contrast between the sides employing them and the sides that aren’t. The Western Bulldogs have been twice obliterated by the opposition’s best mid in their 0-2 start to the season – after Petracca’s Round 1 dominance, Patrick Cripps racked up 22 touches to go with a pair of goals in the first half alone on Friday night, before Luke Beveridge finally relented and sent Josh Dunkley to (successfully) quell his influence.

But the damage had been done.

It’s noticeable, though, that just as the Lions and Bombers learned with Neale and Merrett, shutting down the opposition’s most damaging player can actually be pretty impactful. On Friday night, Sydney’s Callum Mills was tasked with denying Geelong champion Patrick Dangerfield any room to use his explosive speed from stoppages, after he’d torn up the Bombers in Round 1.

The result was a 13-disposal game, less than half of what he’d managed in the opening round; while Mills, who was free to gather his own ball in open space, ended with 29 of his own. Tagging doesn’t always have to mean sacrificing your own game, after all.

It’s a lesson that perhaps Rutten could do with learning, saying after the Bombers’ loss that their reasoning for not tagging Neale was made with their attack in mind.

“We had a decision with what we wanted to do with Neale in that second half. Did we want to try and lock him down a little bit and put a player on him a little bit more at stoppage?” he said in his press conference.

“But in the end we decided not to because we wanted to still keep a bit of flow and attack in our game.

“We needed to get the ascendancy back at clearance to then be able to impact and get some more productivity on the scoreboard.”

It’s a reasonable thought – but I’d argue that the greatest way to ‘get the ascendancy back at clearance’ would be to clamp down on the man who finished the game with 12 of them.