After both Crows and Port Adelaide have failed to live up to expectation, how will the SA-based AFL clubs review their seasons
FOR just the fourth time since SA became a two-team AFL city it is looking likely both the Crows and Port Adelaide will not play AFL finals. The reviews can start now.
- Bone’s Crows, Power player ratings
- Power Rankings: Why Port will embrace underdog status
- Port’s finals dream hinges on power of positivity
- Dixon’s done, Ryder on watch list
- Tight-game complex tearing Power apart
ADELAIDE this week celebrates - or at least reflects - on the 20th anniversary of its second AFL premiership.
How time flies. Two members of that Crows team that defied the critics - and Wayne Carey’s highly favoured Kangaroos - have their sons on the current Adelaide list (Ben Jarman and Jackson Edwards, sons of Darren and Tyson).
And most South Australians are still waiting for a second messiah to deliver a third AFL flag. Neil Craig should have scored one, particularly in 2005. Don Pyke was holding one last year.
Eleven months later SA football is empty-handed.
The 12th-ranked Crows will not play AFL finals for the first time since 2014 - when coach Brenton Sanderson was sacked while holding a two-year contract as the Adelaide board drew a line against mediocrity.
Port Adelaide is eighth today, but - with two home-and-away games to play against the in-form Collingwood and Essendon - is destined to finish a once-promising season in ninth spot.
SA football will stand alongside Queensland as the only mainland state in this AFL national competition without a representative in the top-eight finals. New South Wales, a non-traditional Australian football state, will have two (Sydney and Greater Western Sydney).
It will be the first time since 2011 - when Adelaide was 14th and farewelling Craig and Port Adelaide was 16th of 17 and could have been waved out of the AFL - that SA has no team in the finals.
Since SA was recast to be a two-team state in 1997 (with in-town competition lifting the Crows to find a new level) it is just the fourth time in 21 years - 2000, 2010, 2011 and 2018 - that Adelaide will be free of AFL action in September.
And it is far from what was imagined at the start of the year when there were high hopes for both the Crows (on the rebound from a grand final loss) and Port Adelaide (after a busy raid in the trade market) being top-four contenders.
So what - and who - makes conclusions on why both SA-based teams have underperformed? And who delivers the answers to make sure this is not repeated?
At West Lakes, the Crows will have to deal with a fitness program that crashed - and a determination to go to the edge with mind games.
NBA championship-winning coach Pat Riley would admire Pyke’s attitude this season. He lived the mantra: “Great players and great teams want to be driven. They want to be pushed to the edge. They don’t want to be cheated. Ordinary players and average teams want it to be easy.”
Living on the edge can be dangerous - and also revealing.
At Alberton, Port Adelaide will believe it has seen growth in some players but not enough results to advance the team goal. At least this season the Power has beaten top-eight sides ...
Both coaches - Pyke and Ken Hinkley - are on contract to 2021. But both will feel pressure to deal with faults exposed this season.
And they have to be visionary as the AFL prepares to change the game with “rule adjustments” in October.
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au
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