Port Adelaide’s game-breaking master Chad Wingard can delight and frustrate all at the same time

CHAD Wingard’s brilliance is well noted ... and so is the Port Adelaide forward-midfielder’s penchant to float through an AFL game as if he wished he was somewhere else

Port Adelaide forward Chad Wingard remains an enigma that delights and frustrates all at the same time, as Power fans noted in Saturday’s three-point loss to Hawthorn at Launceston. Picture: Chris Kidd

CHAD Wingard ... mesmerising one moment, bewildering the next; brilliant in one play, confusing the next. The enigma is deeper than ever.

Port Adelaide’s game-breaking forward-midfielder played his 135th AFL game on Saturday - and those who marvelled at Wingard’s genius in one play inevitably questioned the thinking (or lack of it) in another.

Wingard’s split-second, left-hand handpass that set up Justin Westhoff (another misunderstood soul) for one of the Power’s five first-term goals is for the all-time highlights reel. Genius.

But how does Port Adelaide forwards coach Brendon Lade label the kicks that fell short (and excused by the remarkably forgiving Fox Footy commentators as “shanks off the side of the boot”)?

Or the handpasses from a standing position as every Power fan - and probably most of Wingard’s team-mates - expected him to measure the goals to finally hit the scoreboard at Launceston? Sometimes being selfless is not as practical as being a goalkicker in a team struggling to score.

Such moments contradict the theme - best remembered by his work in the last Showdown played at Football Park in 2013 - that Wingard wants the ball in his hand when Port Adelaide needs a match-defining goal.

In a game that had the Fox microphones pick up far too much on-field chatter, what would you pay to hear Port Adelaide runner Chad Cornes’ message to Wingard late in the game? And the response?

Wingard is now approaching his 25th birthday (July 29). Everyone was raving at the start as Wingard’s first 50 AFL games (from 2012 to mid-2014) were marked as the best-ever for a Power player - perhaps any AFL player. He was lauded as a “once-in-a-generation” player while collecting a club champion title (2013) and his first of two All-Australian honours (2013).

But we were also warned at the end of those 50 marvellous games that unlike other masters, Wingard was not obsessed with Australian football (a game he chooses not to watch unless he must).

“He is not absorbed by the suffocating world of AFL,” said Port Adelaide premiership captain Warren Tredrea. “And as long as he can keep himself mentally fresh, the world is his oyster.”

Not every oyster has a pearl.

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