‘Clown’: Kane Cornes apologises after locking co-host out of studio

Kane Cornes has apologised for “unprofessional” behaviour following his Port Adelaide team’s qualifying final implosion.

Kane Cornes was nowhere to be seen when his radio show began on Friday morning following Port Adelaide’s abysmal performance against Geelong on Thursday night.

The footy shock jock showed up late to work for his breakfast radio show on SEN after simply getting his time zones wrong.

The 41-year-old’s blunder left co-host David King locked out of the network’s Adelaide studio and left producers scrambling.

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With footy fans keen to hear Cornes’ analysis following his football club’s crushing 84-point loss to the Cats in their qualifying final at the Adelaide Oval, listeners were no doubt shocked to instead hear the voices of SEN presenters Jordan Kounelis and Nimz Azoor.

The fill-ins had to announce the “unprecedented” situation while sharing news that Cornes was making a desperate dash to the studio.

Fifteen minutes into the show, Cornes and King finally made it to their microphones.

King described his out-of-breath colleague as “rattled” while a sheepish Cornes made a full apology.

Azoor had to tell listeners right off the bat that: “David King is waiting outside the Adelaide studios at the moment on 1 King William Street. Laptop ready to go”.

It seems Cornes was the only member of the show with the security pass needed to access the remote studio that broadcasts live into Melbourne.

Kane Cornes on Footy Classified. Photo: Channel 9.

“This is unprecedented. In the seven years I’ve worked with Kane Cornes I’ve never seen him late,” Azoor said.

For the record, Cornes also made headlines last year when he arrived half-way through an episode of Channel 9’s Sunday Footy Show and gave former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce a bake live on air after the national carrier put him on a delayed flight back to Melbourne.

Cornes’ failure to show up on Friday morning had the jokes flying into the show’s open text line after his team’s abject failure.

“He’s shell-shocked. I think he doesn’t want to come into work today,” Kounelis joked.

Cornes admitted there was no excuse for his “unprofessional” blunder.

“My goodness me. I can explain myself. I can’t really. I’m on bloody Adelaide time. I don’t know what I’m doing,” Cornes said.

Cornes labelled himself a “clown” and said he was in the shower when his phone started ringing with producers asking where he was.

“Kingy’s out the front waiting for me to let him in,” Cornes said.

“So I didn’t call in sick. I didn’t dodge the hard questions that have come from last night. Thank you for stepping up in our time of need.”

Kane Cornes blamed Qantas for missing the first half of the Footy Show.

He went on to say: “I don’t know what I was thinking. Sorry. My apologies. It was my fault. It was pretty ordinary. Unprofessional. If I was a footballer I would have called it unprofessional.”

Fox Footy analyst King was measured in his response.

“It’s not often you listen to your own show live from outside of a studio. You’re rattled,” he said to his co-host.

One message that came through on the show’s text line summed it up.

“Kane’s just another Port Adelaide player that failed to show up, just like last night,” the message read.

Between an airport security search and his team’s capitulation, Cornes described it as “one of the all-time worst days I’ve had”.

Plenty of Port Adelaide fans will be saying the same thing.

Coach Ken Hinkley said after the game hard questions will be asked of his players’ mental toughness on the big stage.

Port Adelaide were outclassed. Photo by Mark Brake/Getty Images.

Hinkley said the Cats appeared “almost two levels above” his desperately disappointing side with the result making it four finals defeats in a row for the Power, three of them at Adelaide Oval, with Hinkley’s finals record slipping to 5-8.

“I can appreciate that question because they’re the facts and I always deal in facts,” Hinkley replied when asked if his side’s poor showing in finals in recent years had become a mental issue.

“The reality is we believe the group are better than that, but for the next 24 hours we have to live with that performance.

“We have to live with the fact that our last three or four finals haven’t been at the level we need them to be.

“Those questions come about once the game turns badly.

“Maybe there is a bit of a moment where they dwell on stuff that they didn’t want to happen that did happen, I think that’s fair, but we hit the lead there at one point and it felt like they were still OK and we were playing OK at that point.

“We were probably lucky to be that close but there’s no doubt about the question, and how they feel about that, but I’ve asked them to quickly unpack what tonight was and then get themselves ready to go again.”

Originally published as ‘Clown’: Kane Cornes apologises after locking co-host out of studio