AFL 2022: Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley doesn’t expect to use top-up players to fill his side
Covid-19 outbreaks are threatening to derail clubs this season, and one has already hit Adelaide. But Power coach Ken Hinkley isn’t concerned.
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Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley does not think clubs will need to use supplementary players to cover Covid absences this year, even if top-up lists are introduced.
The AFL has discussed allowing teams access to state-league talent in case their squads are hit hard by coronavirus.
Adelaide was forced to abandon its internal trial on Friday due to a lack of available players from Covid, close-contact protocols or injury.
Hinkley said he was unsure what the virus was “going to do tomorrow” but he did not expect to have to pick players who were not on AFL lists to field a team.
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“My view is we probably won’t get to that stage,” Hinkley told News Corp.
“We think and hope as a country and a world we’re getting some control over it (Covid).
“But it seems every time we’ve thought that there’s another takeoff somewhere.
“But I don’t expect it (needing to select supplementary players) to be the case.
“We’ve got 42 on our list and I’d like to think we’d explore every one of those players if we needed to because we’re comfortable with what we’ve recruited … (and) that they’re all capable of doing something for us.”
Covid has disrupted the past two men’s seasons and is hampering the AFLW campaign, causing fixture chaos because of border restrictions or players missing games.
Port Adelaide and the Crows might be expected to choose players from their SANFL squads if supplementary lists were introduced.
Former Power vice-captain Hamish Hartlett – now with West Adelaide – backed the top-up concept last week, believing it would provide a huge opportunity for SANFL players.
Hinkley said the Power had handled the logistical challenges coronavirus had brought.
“We’ve been prepared to do whatever we’ve needed to do and I’m proud of the club for that,” he said.
“And we’ll do that again this year.
“Whatever it throws at us again, we’ll be ready for and face the challenge head on, and attack it with everything we’ve got.”
Crows football director Mark Ricciuto last week told Triple M he thought the AFL would introduce a supplementary list for each club.
“It is going to be interesting, it’s going to be a weird year,” Ricciuto said.
“Hopefully it doesn’t happen.”
Adelaide was able to complete a match simulation on Friday despite having 17 of its squad sidelined.
Twenty-six AFL-listed players were available.
The Crows expected to have more fit to face Brisbane at Metricon Stadium on Friday.
Port wants to blow up the pokies, denies debt’s hurting club
— Simeon Thomas-Wilson and Matt Turner
Port Adelaide is aiming to no longer be reliant on revenue from poker machines but needs to build its asset base and revenue streams first, chief executive Matthew Richardson says.
The Power are one of seven remaining AFL clubs who still use pokies for funding.
At the club’s Annual General Meeting on Friday evening, Richardson said in response to a question from a fan that the Power were aiming to divest from this.
But he said the club needed to first grow its asset base and revenue streams.
“There’s no doubt that our ambition is to not be reliant on that revenue,” he said.
“The critical thing that we need to do is build our asset base and revenue streams so that we can get to a point where we can divest outside of those assets.
“And that’s absolutely what we are working on, so at some point in the future hopefully we can do that.
“The revenue that we do generate through those assets we do put back into the community and into our facilities ... but over time hopefully we can build the asset base and the revenue base of the club so we don’t rely on that in the future.”
The Power announced prior to Friday evening that it had turned its finances around by $8.8 million, bouncing back from a tough first year of the Covid pandemic and clearing a significant chunk of its debt.
On Tuesday, the club announced a $4.7 million statutory profit for 2021, which followed a $4 million loss 12 months earlier.
It also declared it had repaid $3.2 million in debt, driven by a growth in operating revenues across membership, corporate partnerships, hospitality and gate receipts.
Port chairman David Koch said he was “stunned” about some of the comments that had come in about the club’s finances.
“One of the most common comments on the forums is “oh you have stuck in the government grants for facilities and the $1.5 million you got from the state government”, let me assure you there are no government grants in this result,” he said.
He said the focus shouldn’t be entirely on the club’s debt.
“People rightly focus on debt and we have $9 million of debt ... but we have net assets of almost $15 million,” he said.
“It’s like me saying “what is your home loan and you say $500,000 and I saw woah that’s a lot” and you say yeah but the house is worth $1.5 million, that isn’t too bad.
“It’s the same for the club, we own the assets, we own a licensed club, we own the facilities ... so we have strong assets to allow us to carry the debt like that.”
Koch also announced that Rob Snowdon had won the member ballot to replace Port legend Gavin Wanganeen on the club’s board, while Andrew Day would also step down from his position as a director.
Snowdon, a former football manager for both the Power and Sydney, has interestingly been a mentor to current Adelaide senior coach Matthew Nicks.
He defeated Grantly Stevens and Greg Troughton in the vote.
Port Adelaide’s head of AFLW Juliet Haslam said the club had gone out to market on Thursday for their head coach role as they prepare to enter the league in 2023.
‘LOOK OUT’: HINKLEY’S WARNING TO PORT NAYSAYERS
Five months on from his side’s horror preliminary final loss, Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley has a message for the football world: “We’re still here and look out”.
“That’s what we are, we are still here,” Hinkley told News Corp.
“We’ve copped one but we’re still here.
“We’ve lived to fight and we’ll fight.”
Hinkley started last season by saying his side was ready to win the premiership but finished it searching for answers after the Power’s humiliating 71-point defeat to the Western Bulldogs.
The coaches reviewed the game the next week then brought the players back into the club on best-and-fairest night to rewatch edited clips of it and reflect.
“The players didn’t need to be isolated and sent out away and feel like it was only them that wasn’t quite right,” Hinkley said.
“We broke down parts of the game that we didn’t enjoy but also to understand that there was a lot of stuff through the year (and) we’re not the finished product.
“Some of your toughest lessons in life are really hard to take but you have to take them.
“We took our lesson and we’ll learn from it.”
Hinkley said on reflection the team could have tweaked its preparation and training in the lead-up to the match.
“Going into the game I think we might have won seven or eight in a row,” he said.
“We thought going in ‘we’ve got it pretty right’ but the end result says we didn’t.”
The Bulldogs smashed Port Adelaide around the contest that night as the scoreline blew out to be the Power’s biggest loss since Round 22, 2019.
“Any game you’re in a cutthroat situation, you don’t sit there trying to be safe, you’re trying to win, so it (the final margin) can end up being quite a disaster,” Hinkley said.
“You’re not sitting there saving the game or trying to keep the damage down, you’re chasing the game – you go hard at it.
“The result was a terrible result and we have to live with that.
“We know we were better than that team but ultimately we don’t get to talk about that in any way, shape or form, and we shouldn’t because we didn’t play the way we should’ve.
“But we can’t stay there forever – you have to review the game and you have to move on.
“We’re getting ready to start again.”
INTRA-CLUB INTEL: ALL THE ACTION FOR PORT’S INTERNAL TRIAL
Port Adelaide has been a popular pre-season choice to drop down the ladder by critics who believe the club has had its chances or that it has slipped too far behind grand finalists Melbourne and the Bulldogs.
Hinkley – under contract until the end of 2023 – was adamant his side could end an 18-year premiership drought this coming season.
“We’re a good team, we’re a good footy club – a great footy club,” he said.
“When you’ve got an attitude that nothing’s too hard, you’ll keep at it.
“A kick in the guts is a kick in the guts and you’ve got to get up – that’s what Port Adelaide does.
“I see the way these blokes train, I see the way they’ve come back and the way they compete and I’ve got absolute confidence in us as a football club achieving our goal.”
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Originally published as AFL 2022: Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley doesn’t expect to use top-up players to fill his side
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