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Nine times out of ten, there’s no shame in losing to a bona fide premiership contender.
Make no mistake, Port Adelaide are that good. Right now, I’m not sure there’s a coach in the AFL with more to work with in his playing group than Ken Hinkley; the Power are blessed with quality ball-users across the ground, who also happen to be ferocious tacklers, relentless at the contest and lightning quick on the rebound. Aesthetically, they’re a treat to watch, unless of course you happen to barrack for the side they’re tearing apart.
The Western Bulldogs won’t be the only team this year to be taught a football lesson by Port; but that doesn’t make their 22-point loss on Friday night on home soil, a defeat that will likely see them finish the round outside the eight, any less frustrating.
Both these sides have immense talent at their disposal, but only one seems capable of harnessing it with any regularity. Only one side seems to have a plan with how to use their weapons to maximum potential. Only one side was able or willing to execute a strategy to nullify a key opponent. Only one side could turn a dominant performance in all facets from a star midfielder into a game-changing point of difference. And not for the first time under Luke Beveridge, it wasn’t the Dogs.
Once again, the Bulldogs lost despite dominating the disposal count – 381-311, to be exact. Once again, they lost despite an all-time game from a key midfielder, with Tom Liberatore on this occasion taking the mantle usually held by Marcus Bontempelli. And once again, the Dogs were defeated in a maddeningly similar way: wayward when kicking inside 50, their ball movement by hand clamped down on with suffocating pressure, and cruelly exposed again and again with fast, slingshot football off half-back that scythes through a defensive structure as wafer-thin as any team’s in the league.
The Power, in contrast, have a style as easily identifiable as it is difficult to stop. Every sinew of their being is primed to attack. It’s visible in the desire of their defenders to try and mark everything and only spoil as a last resort, in the way their half-backs look at every opportunity to get the ball either back through the corridor or, failing that, into open space on the outer side, in the way their half-forwards spring for the ball to turn hacked kicks from the centre that are harmless for just about every other team into marks, and especially in the way one of Zak Butters or Connor Rozee are always on hand out the front of the stoppage, from where their speed makes catching them impossible and their impeccable ball use brings every forward into the game.
Ollie Wines was a fascinating watch in this regard on Friday night: regularly starting on a wing, he would make a beeline time and again for the contest, leaving Bailey Williams to hold his space on the outside; but his presence around the ball allowed the Power both another strong body at the coalface, and give one of Butters or Rozee the power to get into a dangerous attacking position.
I lost count of how many times Wines, or Jason Horne-Francis, or Travis Boak were able to shrug their way through tackles, often with two or three Dogs hanging off them, and get a handball to the superstar in an acre of space out the front of the stoppage, to send Port deep into attack once again.
It’s why, while Butters and Rozee’s six and four clearances respectively paled in comparison to the Dogs’ key mids Liberatore (11) and Bontempelli (8), Butters would finish with a game-high 11 score assists and six inside 50s, with Rozee not far behind on six and four. It’s also why Port managed four goals from centre bounces – an area where the Dogs had noticeably tightened up this year, having conceded fewer goals from this source than any other team in the league after leaking like a sieve in 2022.
Without the ball, the Power’s set-up defensively is infinitely better than last year, where their backmen’s relative lack of size and strength saw them frequently divided and conquered when under siege. Port had 15 contested one-on-one marking contests in their defensive half against the Bulldogs, losing only four; that’s about as good as you can hope for from backmen whose main role is to launch the ball back the other way.
That’s when Port’s main strength kicks in: I couldn’t name you a single Power player who used the ball poorly by foot on Friday night. Their defence is stacked with elite ball-users, from Trent McKenzie, the best kick among the league’s key defenders by some distance, to smalls Dan Houston, Dylan Williams and Kane Farrell, all of whom rarely make errors. Presumably this is why Darcy Byrne-Jones, far less reliable by foot, has been recast this year as a pressure small forward, to great effect as well.
It meant that, halfway through the second quarter, the Power’s plan was clear: playing on from 38 per cent of their marks, the task was to get the ball into dangerous positions as quickly as possible. It’s a style designed to hit the Dogs at their biggest weakness – defending behind the ball – and with 54 inside 50s to 51 despite a 47-31 clearance thrashing and 70 fewer disposals, it worked an absolute treat.
Perhaps the Power’s greatest achievement was to render Tim English, the game’s best around-the-ground ruckman by a distance, a virtual non-factor in every facet. Scott Lycett, whose career has been rejuvenated in the last month after looking a spent force to start this year, gave English a torrid evening throughout; jumping into him at ball-ups with gay abandon, engaging him in frequent battles of strength that have always been a weakness, and giving him the sort of ruck bath that used to be commonplace in his developing days but are far rarer now.
Helped out by his teammates, who never missed a chance to block, bump or harass English as he attempted to move between contests in a similar vein to what they pulled off against Max Gawn in their win over Melbourne, Lycett was comfortably the best ruckman on the ground; English, who gathered 27 possessions and marked everything in a one-man stand against Geelong, mustered just five kicks and gained 35 metres in his poorest night of the year by a stretch.
What makes Port great is that they play in a way that beautifully complements their strengths: their ball users are encouraged to bite off difficult kicks, their defenders to intercept, Rozee and Butters to use their pace and footy smarts to get into dangerous positions, Lycett to be a stoppage animal. After all the criticism that came Hinkley’s way throughout 2022 and to start this year, the man is coaching the lights out at the moment.
All these things are even more apparent when the opposition is lacking them, as the Bulldogs were tonight. Having watched every one of their matches in Melbourne this year, I honestly couldn’t tell you what the Dogs’ brand is, to borrow a David King cliche.
Marcus Bontempelli and Tom Liberatore. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
The Dogs started by actively lowering their eyes and looking to hit up targets inside 50, occasionally to their detriment as Bailey Dale regularly found Power chests; but within 15 minutes, they were back to haphazardly bombing it in and praying for something to happen.
At stoppages, Liberatore was utterly Herculean all evening to keep the Dogs in the hunt until almost the final five minutes virtually by himself, but time and again his clever handballs to teammates in space on the outside were squandered by a lack of any plan as to what comes next.
Not everything comes back to Beveridge: he can’t help it that Dale, the best kick in the game in 2021, now can barely go five minutes without an outrageous decision by foot coming back to bite him. He can’t help it that Aaron Naughton now seems determined to demand every ball be sat on his head despite being all but unstoppable when given a run and jump at the ball.
But there are some things that Beveridge does that other coaches don’t do. There is not one single team in the competition that would have James O’Donnell as part of a first-choice team, let alone empower him to try an ambitious left-foot pass into the corridor during the third quarter that led straight to a crucial Todd Marshall goal. After five weeks in the team – two more than he needed in the VFL to convince Beveridge he was ready for AFL having not played the sport for four years prior – he is averaging fewer than six disposals per game, two of them invariably poor skill errors, while offering nothing as an aerial target.
It’s unfair to single out O’Donnell, though; Josh Bruce had quite possibly the worst quarter I’ve ever seen from a key defender in the first, directly giving up four of the Power’s six goals through a combination of boneheaded free kicks, dropped sitters and forgetting how to spoil. If he is the best option in defence, then maybe Naughton really does need to be swung down back after all.
At this stage, the Dogs’ only strategy seems to be… hope. Hope Liberatore gets his hands on everything at the coalface. Hope Bontempelli straps the team onto his back and wills them over the line. Hope Liam Jones intercepts everything in defence, hope English plays like prime Gary Dempsey every week, hope Naughton clunks everything up forward and then converts.
Hope that one of the three Bulldogs in Jason Horne-Francis’ vicinity at this crucial defensive 50 contest would stick the tackle to end the danger, because God forbid any of them look to block up his path back to goal instead of trying to stop the AFL’s strongest teenager one on one.
When it comes to the opposition, there is yet again no plan to curtail the most dangerous opposition players: Butters was allowed to roam free with impunity all game long, as was Rozee. Since Christian Petracca tore the 2021 grand final to shreds, and arguably even earlier than that, the Dogs have either been unable or unwilling to keep rival guns from dominant performances
The clouds might align enough for the Dogs to win the games they need to sneak into the finals this year – and as they proved three weeks ago against Adelaide, the talent in this team is good enough to beat quality opposition when it all comes together. But
Port are better than the Bulldogs – it was a fact before this game, and it’s set in stone now. They are quicker, stronger, smarter and more skilled, and right now they’re playing at maximum potential.
They are everything the Bulldogs could be. Unfortunately for everyone in red, white and blue, 2023 now looks destined to be another waste of the most talented squad this football club has ever assembled.
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