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It wasn’t exactly wall-to-wall action, frenetic football, goals aplenty, and all those other things we like to associate with a good game.
But Port Adelaide’s thrilling, famous win over St Kilda was still clearly one of the season’s most engrossing games.
There were heroes aplenty: Jason Horne-Francis was a monster all night at the coalface, Travis Boak proved when he gets a run on the ball he’s still just about the Power’s classiest on-baller, and young Dylan Williams’ exceptional ball use from defence set everything in motion. That’s without even mentioning Junior Rioli’s two brilliant third-quarter goals, Willem Drew’s tagging job on Mason Wood that forced a Plan B from Ross Lyon for the first time this year, and the season’s best smother from big Charlie Dixon.
But the biggest hero of all was smiling on the bench: this was a triumph with Ken Hinkley’s fingerprints all over it. He’s had incredible highs in his time at the helm, reaching three preliminary finals in his decade in charge of the Power, but I don’t think he’s ever had a better night as coach.
The Power came in with a plan to test a Saints defence conceding, on average, 59 points a game in six rounds under Ross Lyon. Much like Lachie Jones tagging Nick Daicos against Collingwood in Round 2, it was a brazen plan, high-risk and with every chance of getting Ken Hinkley into the headlines for all the wrong reasons during the week. You can’t say Port’s coach isn’t a brave man.
The Power were going to run the gauntlet at Marvel Stadium. Every clearance was a chance to be ultra-aggressive, his midfielders backed to break tackles, surge through space, and pinpoint targets. The rare times they took a mark, the directive was to play on wherever possible, made apparent from the moment Dan Houston marked the Power’s first kick-in of the evening, immediately whirled, and with two Saints bearing down, ran clear and kicked down the middle.
Even Port’s defenders were in on this: when they had the ball, no one was considered too indispensable to the defensive structure to run forward and present as an option inside 50.
Of their 10 marks inside 50 to three quarter time – already the equal-most the Saints have given up all season – Dan Houston, Riley Bonner and Aliir Aliir all had one apiece. In 49 previous games for Port Adelaide, Aliir had previously taken just four, and only one in his last 31 matches; and yet there he was, floating away from Tim Membrey to the edge of the 50, for an uncontested mark with the Saints defenders set up in the usual 10-to-30-metre zone you’d expect the ball to come in.
It was bold, and at quarter time, it looked stupid. With the dice-roll came a lack of accountability, a desire to zone off and attack the Saints that let them rack up 37 marks to just 12 by the first break. Even more alarmingly were the players with that amount of uncontested ball – Bradley Hill and Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera had five marks apiece, while Sinclair three to go with 13 disposals and 206 metres gained.
It seemed as if Hinkley had bought into the trap that the Saints are a stodgy, well-drilled team that wears you into submission, and not a side with enough attacking weapons to break you if you’re loose enough. Gold Coast found that out the hard way three weeks ago.
As a result, the Saints, the league’s least efficient team going inside 50 this year despite a sensational six weeks – they went in to Friday night scoring from 39.2 per cent of their entries – had seven marks and seven scores from just 10 inside 50s. Despite intense pressure from Port up the field, desperate to lock the ball inside their attacking 50 and allow for repeat stoppages and chances to score, the Saints had enough patience to chip the ball around, wait for opportunities to present themselves, and execute ruthlessly.
For what it’s worth, the Power’s only two goals came from the forward-50 disputed balls they were trying to generate, but Ross Lyon will take a pair of quick, under-pressure kicks amid congestion from Xavier Duursma and Travis Boak that fortunately sail through every day of the week.
Neither were the sort of clean, easy kicks for goal the Saints were generating on the regular.
The Saints are a fascinating case study in risk versus reward: no team uses the boundaries more often than they do, and while they have conceded a league-most turnovers across the first six rounds, they just don’t give up scores from them. Moving the ball down the boundary means that when the errors come, the opposition is hemmed in, either forced to go long up the line or bite off an inside ball, which the Saints back themselves to intercept and punish.
The exception is their designated kickers: Sinclair can often be seen hovering somewhere in the centre square, and if he gets enough space, he’ll be used every single time. Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera, too, is empowered to dash down the spine as well – but only if he can. Despite rivalling Collingwood as the quickest ball-movement team in the game, most of that speed comes when they force a turnover. From defence, they play the waiting game, especially if they’re given free rein to do so.
The Power’s first term was all the uglier by Jason Horne-Francis having the quarter of his life in the midst of it all. Single-handedly preventing the Saints from dominating in the clinches, he had six clearances by quarter time, the most recorded in a single term by a player all season, and was clearly benefitting from Hinkley’s plea to his midfielders to worry about the footy first and the opposition second.
Explosive from the clinches, none of the Saints had pace out of the blocks to stop him, with the result three free kicks to quarter-time as they tried and failed to check his run.
Jason Horne-Francis celebrates a Port Adelaide win. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
Five goals to two at quarter time, it seemed for all the world that the Power had underestimated the Saints, and would pay. How wrong we were.
The Power went at it all again in the second term, with some minor tweaks: Boak shifted into the inside having spent time off a wing, while Willem Drew moved to a wing to run alongside Mason Wood, where he’d remain for the rest of the game. Darcy Byrne-Jones, who started on Sinclair but hardly touched him for the remainder of the quarter, was tasked with sticking with him every time he moved to the corridor, with the goal to deny him the uncontested marks and kicks he was racking up.
The two defensive moves worked: Wood, surely the current All-Australian wingman, drifted so far out of the game that by the third term Lyon had to move him forward to try and fix the Saints’ lapse into inefficiency moving forward, while Sinclair wouldn’t take a single mark for the rest of the game.
The Power were clever: assessing that Wood has had the measure aerially over lighter-bodied wingers all season long, matched him with a big body from the moment Xavier Duursma’s knee injury allowed them to. It meant bizarre sights like Ollie Wines standing Wood on a wing before moving in to create an outnumber at the stoppage and asking the question of the Saint. For the most part, though, Drew stayed on him, and keeping him to 18 disposals, two marks and a goal from a free kick (not Drew’s fault, in case you were wondering) was a huge win.
Dialling their pressure on the ball-carrier up to frenetic, and denying the Saints easy territory gains through uncontested marks – after 37 to quarter time, they’d manage just 19 in the second term – St Kilda’s ball movement went from damaging to wasteful. Remarkably, after five goals from 10 inside 50s in the first term, they’d have 16 inside 50s in the second, for four behinds.
Even better for Port, their offensive strategy was paying off, too, successfully stretching the Saints’ defence on the counterattack, booting three goals to three quarter time from defensive 50 chains – already more than their season average.
Hugely influential was the boot of young Dylan Williams, who with 17 disposals, 14 of them kicks, at 94 per cent efficiency, plus 532 metres gained, set up Port’s attack time and time again with five rebound 50s from six disposals in the all-important second term.
That Horne-Francis bloke was going alright as well.
Helping matters even further was the Power’s ability to keep the Saints’ bevy of intercepting talls occupied: Charlie Dixon had as influential a nine-disposal, two-goal game as he’ll ever have.
Clearly out of touch early after a pair of dropped marks, Dixon clunked only three for the night – one at a crucial stage in the final term – but had three or four moments where he tapped the ball perfectly to the advantage of a teammate from a contest, a bigger win than if he’d taken a grab himself.
Add to that his exceptional pressure, most apparent in this desperate last-quarter smother directly leading to a crucial Sam Powell-Pepper goal, and he not only successfully occupied the potentially dangerous Dougal Howard in the air, but impacted the scoreboard heavily too.
At no point, not even when the Saints hit the lead midway through the third term, did the Power stop attacking. With Horne-Francis held to ‘just’ two clearances after half time by Jack Steele having had nine to the break, the rest stepped up: after 21 Power players had seven clearances between them to half time, the second half had that figure double to 14.
The Power backed themselves again and again to win the tough ball, or pressure the Saints into a turnover when they won it; then move the ball fast enough to catch the most miserly backline in the league on the hop. When inside 50, having successfully pressured the Saints into turnovers, they backed the brilliance of Junior Rioli to deliver, which he did with two vital goals in rapid succession to ensure a lead at the final turn.
It wasn’t as if the Saints didn’t have their chances to counterattack, but they weren’t coming with anything like the regularity they were earlier on.
Only with under 10 minutes to go and a slender eight-point lead did the Power shut up shop: in the final term, their play on percentage from marks halved from 35 per cent to just 17 per cent, while they had eight intercept marks in the quarter after just four in the first three.
Two of them were taken by Jeremy Finlayson drifting back into the hole as a loose man, the surest sign of all the Power were confident in holding on. Just as important was that the pressure on the ball-carrier never lifted, and that combined with trailing on the scoreboard saw the Saints panic well before such a thing was necessary.
With seven minutes left and a two-point deficit after Hunter Clark’s dribbling goal, the stage was set for the Saints, in front of a frenzied home crowd, to clinch it. Instead, from the next centre bounce, the Power pulled a trick from St Kilda’s own playbook: won a scrappy turnover, chipped it around, then found their best kicker in space in the corridor – Dan Houston, whose last quarter as a spare behind the ball was exceptional – for a long kick to Dixon, in a one-on-one tussle at the top of the goalsquare, distanced enough from Josh Battle to mark before his desperate spoil could arrive.
Even still, with six minutes left, the Saints still had time for patience, especially with the Power all but sitting back and daring them to get as close as they could. But from the moment Wood looked for an ambitious kick into the corridor, and instead found that man Houston on the chest, Port were never truly troubled again – though if a Hail Mary long kick from Jack Higgins hadn’t sailed just wide from their one positive foray forward, a grandstand finish would have been inevitable.
The Power’s plan, the one that unlocked the Saints at last, won’t suit every team. But it should at least be a template that if you run the gauntlet on St Kilda, a bad quarter shouldn’t deter you from keeping going. This Saints team prides itself on hanging tough when the momentum is against them – they did just that against Carlton’s second-quarter burst last week, and have had a period of being dominated in virtually every match.
It just so happened that the Power’s period on top brought them four second-quarter goals, and a grip on the match that they never truly relinquished.
This is why it’s a victory as much Hinkley’s doing as any of the deeds of his players. The Power had a plan, didn’t panic when it backfired early, kept the faith, and were rewarded richly.
The next time he’s copping it from the media or even his own fans, tonight’s game should be Exhibit A on why he is very much still an AFL-calibre coach, premiership or no.
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