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The two biggest losers on the weekend were the Brisbane Lions and Port Adelaide, both teams now sitting 1-2 after coming into the season as premiership fancies.
Geelong faltered against the Suns to go 0-3, but the players can go home and polish their medals while supporters can throw on last year’s grand final to ease their pain. Lions and Power players and fans have no such luxuries. Their time is supposed to be now.
Things don’t get any easier next week for them either, with the Lions hosting a white-hot Collingwood and the Power travelling to the SCG to tackle Sydney. A 1-3 start is very much on the cards, and another season soon to be wasted.
Brisbane, for so long a scoring powerhouse under Chris Fagan, have suddenly become offensively inept.
The slows on the Lions for the past four or five years is that they haven’t been able to defend appropriately, especially in September. They’ve lost six of nine finals under Fagan, with four of those losses at the Gabba.
Their downhill skiing type of game hasn’t produced winning scores in the heat of the pointy end, but it has conceded them.
Charlie Cameron is arguably the best in the league at what he does, but hasn’t exactly started this season in a blaze of glory. Joe Daniher and Eric Hipwood have been terribly inconsistent across their careers, and they will always be so.
In Hipwood’s case, they are stuck with him until the end of 2029 in a horrendous piece of list management. So far in 2023, with the ink still drying on that contract, he is averaging six touches and less than a goal a game. Oof.
The Lions added Jack Gunston to their forward-line, and the run and dash of Conor McKenna to their backline. The team that lacks defensive steel, now has McKenna, Daniel Rich and Keidean Coleman running off half-back, and with so many forwards Cam Rayner has been added to that mix too. None of them exactly scream ‘defensive resilience’.
Josh Dunkley and Will Ashcroft have come on board as two more prime movers to complement Lachie Neale, Hugh McCluggage, Dayne Zorko, Jarrod Berry and the like too.
(Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
So where has it all gone wrong?
Brisbane are actually ranked first for clearances this season after being second last year, but they aren’t converting this into inside 50s, where they are currently 16th. They’ve always been a direct, low-possession team, but they are struggling to find their run and link play.
The biggest pointer to how much they are struggling is actually their opposition – Port, Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs are a combined 2-4 in their other matches across the first three rounds. The Power and Dogs are winless except for their wins over the Lions. It’s not like they have overwhelmingly faced teams in form.
The synergy of the Brisbane outfit is all wrong right now.
Zac Bailey hasn’t had an impact, Lincoln McCarthy looks finished, while Daniher, Hipwood and Cameron have had almost no say for the most part. They are not working cohesively as a forward unit, and the midfielders are also turning the ball over more.
Port have become specialists in “all talk, no action” under Ken Hinkley. We’ve seen them either give up a season without a whimper or crumble under different kinds of pressure in finals. Their last three finals losses under Hinkley have all been at home as favourites. In 2020 and 2021 they hosted preliminary finals, with the latter resulting in a 71-point loss after conceding the first five goals in 15 minutes.
No team had more swagger after Round 1 than the Power. And yes, they did look magnificent. But what we didn’t realise at the time was that Brisbane would prove to be struggling, and Port haven’t looked like it since.
They went to Melbourne in Round 2 thinking they were primed to knock off the might of Collingwood, and were instead handed a footballing lesson. No doubt still ahead of themselves, as they have constantly proven to be, they assumed the winless Crows were easy pickings and threw in the towel when the fight was taken to them.
Travis Boak (Photo by Daniel Kalisz/Getty Images)
How many Port players would you truly want running out and playing football for your life, knowing you were going to get maximum effort, hardness and consistency? The list is small, headed by Travis Boak, Tom Jonas, and Sam Powell-Pepper.
Boak looks severely underdone so far this season, and his 34 years might have caught up with him. Jonas looks like an old 32 right now, and the cliff may well be approaching quickly. Which leaders will stand up to take the place of these veterans, who have given everything?
There’s no shame in losing to Collingwood, given most teams will this year. But the Pies’ average winning margin against other sides is 18 points, whereas they hammered Port by 71. And then the Power allowed Adelaide to pile on seven goals in the last quarter, and turned a three-goal lead into a five-goal defeat.
Is it too early to be ringing the alarm bells for Brisbane and Port?
When you’ve got top four and premiership aspirations, are sitting 1-2 and favoured to become 1-3, then no it’s not. It’s also not too early to respond. We must see something this week, but just as importantly, pick off the easier wins in the weeks after as their respective draws open up.
And let’s not forget about the axe that is hovering somewhere above Ken Hinkley’s head right now too…