Port Adelaide came so close last season, now it has another chance to measure up

IT WAS a maddening realisation of how close they’d come. Port Adelaide have the chance to test their qualities once more, writes Gerard Whateley.

AFL - Port v Hawthorn Preliminary Final MCG. Jay Schulz and Hamish Hartlett slump to the ground after the loss. Photo Sarah Reed.

IT WAS shock rather than desolation. The maddening realisation of how close they’d come. And the inherent understanding that what hadn’t been grasped would haunt them.

Port Adelaide’s players had lived their creed — to never give up — in such a compelling manner as to almost steal the Grand Final berth ordained for Hawthorn.

President David Koch clapped in admiration as the final siren halted the surge agonisingly short. Every fair-minded observer shared the prevailing sentiment.

Ken Hinkley had lived too much in footy to feel anything but the acrid taste of loss.

As he made his way to the rooms the coach passed a Hawks official who offered his admiring condolences.

Hinkley bit at the sentiment so fiercely that he later felt compelled to call and apologise to a man he had long known.

He marched through the particular silence that engulfs a narrow Preliminary Final loser into the solitude of the meeting room to await his men.

In the privacy of those walls the truth was always spoken. For better and for worse.

Hinkley’s gift to his players from their first day together was to be direct and unflinching. No platitudes. No compromises.

The players craved the judgments and thrived on the knowledge.

Hinkley would impart his emotive imaginary with absolute calm and authority.

Just a week before, at half-time in Perth, he’d urged his men to play their way offering the freedom that if they were to lose they could at least look each other in the eye.

Hawthorn narrowly beat Port Adelaide in the preliminary final last year. Picture: Sarah Reed

As had happened so often across two seasons the players responded to the masterful touch.

Losing the penultimate game by three points represented perhaps the first true disappointment of the Hinkley era.

As he spoke he began with two simple words: small margins.

The shot at goal. The target missed. The obvious target, the critical target. The disorder around the clearances under opposition assault.

“I can’t not be proud of you,” Hinkley offered to the faces holding his gaze. “But you’re hurting and you should be hurting. Because you had a chance to play in a Grand Final. And you didn’t get it done. That’s tough but that’s fact.”

Small margins and hurt hung thick in the claustrophobic room reeking of sweat and unfulfillment.

Port Adelaide have made a slow start to 2015. Picture: Sarah Reed

With the lesson conveyed Hinkley artfully intertwined the mission concluded with the quest that lay ahead.

“It’s a long, long, long way to get back there. But you’ve got to be up for the battle. Because in great footy clubs they just keep coming back.

“They make preseason harder, they make it tougher. They keep pushing each other to the limit so that when we get our chance we take it next year, we take our opportunity.”

How it burns and how those words linger is only ever told in hindsight. But if a team can be defined by the character of its coach then those small margins obsess the mind.

Hinkley couldn’t bring himself to return to the MCG a week later, vowing not to attend the Grand Final until his team was participating.

Off-season conversations would inevitably stray to the breakdown in those stoppages and the useless rummaging for posthumous corrections. Or pondering the late-game creativity that took them within a breath of rescuing the result.

Even as Hinkley holidayed such flashes denied him any complete release preoccupied by impatience to embark on the challenge anew.

Port Adelaide hasn’t assumed the mantle as the number one contender. Having been narrowly outboxed by Fremantle and bluntly beaten by Sydney, that ranking is up for decision in the West.

But as Port faces its conqueror and the reigning champion, it has lost few admirers and none of its conviction or commitment to the long way back.

As well as working through some pent-up frustrations against the Hawks, it’s the chance to test their qualities once more in the smallest of margins.