AFL 2021: Warren Tredrea on how Port Adelaide players, coaches failed preliminary final test
The coaching tactics of Ken Hinkley must feel the heat, namely one error which put the Power on the back foot from the first bounce, writes Warren Tredrea.
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The Western Bulldogs were too tough, disciplined, desperate and efficient.
Port Adelaide, on the other hand, was pathetic.
With the stakes so high, it offered so little.
It knew what it was coming up against and failed to rise to the challenge.
The worst part was it happened from the very first minute.
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The Power was well rested, playing on their home ground, missing only one player in Mitch Georgiades from their best 22 and with the luxury of living in their home state free from the Covid mayhem.
The opposing Western Bulldogs had been on the road for weeks and jet setting around the country, having recently travelled to Tasmania, Brisbane, Perth then onto Adelaide while living in quarantine hubs.
Port fans deserved better.
The players must take their share of the heat, it’s an indictment of the group of not coming to play when the stakes were so high.
You only get blown off the park at the start of the game when you aren’t mentally prepared for a ruthless finals contest.
As senior coach, Ken Hinkley must also feel the heat. It’s his job to keep his players motivated and mentally on edge ready to perform in the biggest game of their careers.
They looked unprepared for what was coming.
Hinkley’s coaching tactics must also be questioned. Why did run-with midfielder Willem Drew start on the bench instead of alongside Bulldogs clearance king Tom Liberatore, a job he performed perfectly only a few weeks ago?
The Bulldogs are the best clearance team in the competition, and Libba is the linchpin, averaging close to eight clearances per game.
The coaching clanger was obvious for all to see. Before Drew entered the arena, Liberatore had already collected five disposals and had two score involvements.
Before you could blink the score was 5.1 goals to nil — game over.
Port Adelaide’s coaching department has been in public denial about their troublesome first quarters against the competition’s best.
In four matches against 2021 grand finalists the Western Bulldogs (three matches) and Melbourne (one), Port has lost every first quarter.
Collectively the Demons and Bulldogs have kicked 20.6 in first quarters to the Power’s 6.7.
While a lot of the pre-game commentary was about the undermanned Dogs, the reality was they still possessed a proud and lethal midfield brigade.
They were so quick with the hands and feet in the contest and they denied Port the space they thrive in.
It was a coaching masterclass from Luke Beveridge and his team. Bailey Smith pushed up the ground as high half-forward, ripping Port apart with his gut running and link-up chain play, while the Power chose to let him go and keep a defensive back six.
It was at their peril. Smith kicked the first goal of the game and after the Dogs had kicked their fifth major in a row, he led the disposal count with six, plus two inside-50s — and finished the game with 23 disposals, six inside-50s and four goals in a best-on-ground performance.
He wasn’t alone. Early on the Dogs led the clearances 7-1, doubled Port in both uncontested and contested possessions and marks were 13-4.
Port’s Round 23 scrappy two-point win clearly diluted the coaches’ thinking, because at quarter-time of the Round 9 loss to the Dogs the statistics mirror those on Saturday night.
The Bulldogs’ dominance once again highlighted Port Adelaide’s forwards reluctance to lead at the kicker and dictate forward play.
I have said for years that every forward’s first lead must be at the kicker — it makes defenders more accountable and brings midfield runners into the play with overlap run.
Port’s key forwards always call for the ball long while stationary or want the ball kicked over the back into space running back towards goal. That only works when there is no pressure on the kicker – and always breaks down in high-pressure games like finals.
You needn’t look any further than the way Josh Schache played on All-Australian star defender Aliir Aliir. He led up hard at the kicker and demanded the ball be kicked to him. This instantly made Aliir accountable and dragged him out of the Dogs’ attacking 50, where he loves to intercept the ball.
After travelling the country with the attitude of we will play “anytime, anywhere”, Beveridge also picked a fight with SA Health about not being able to train on Adelaide Oval the day before the game.
This reinforced the message he was selling to his players and kept them on edge — “It’s us against the rest”.
Too tough, too ferocious, too desperate, and too disciplined. The Bulldogs are deserved Grand Finalists.
DID PORT GO BACKWARDS IN 2021?
— Simeon Thomas-Wilson
Ken Hinkley says it isn’t the right time to judge Port Adelaide’s 2021 season, following a second straight preliminary final exit.
But Port fans will be wondering just what progress their side has made this year as the uncomfortable question starts to be asked by the Power faithful: “Have we actually gone backwards this year?”.
Especially when Hinkley again reiterated prior to Saturday night’s game that fans, critics and pundits should “wait and judge us when we can get all our people that we need on the team playing well together, give us some continuity back together and we can play at a high level”.
While he was reluctant to reflect on the 2021 campaign after the 71-point thrashing at the hands of the Western Bulldogs, — Port’s biggest finals loss since the 2007 grand final — Hinkley did say for his side to be one of the final four teams remaining was “a bloody good effort”.
And he was right. To make a second-straight preliminary final after they failed to make the top eight for two seasons after their 2014 effort was indeed a bloody good effort from the Power.
After the causality ward was sparsely populated in 2020, Port copped a swath of injuries to key players.
They heard nearly all year that they were the flat-track bullies of the AFL as they struggled to lay a glove on a top-four side.
But once the injury list dwindled and the key players came back the Power seemed to have timed their run perfectly.
They looked to have buried the flat-track bully tag when they knocked off the Bulldogs in the final game of the home-and-away season, and then they blew Geelong out of the water in the qualifying final.
The team that had been probably the fifth-best side for most of the season was in the final four.
Aliir Aliir, who was poor with the ball by foot as the Bulldogs’ plan of using Josh Schache to blunt his impact paid off in spades, was the recruit of the year prior to Saturday night.
Willem Drew has made a midfield spot his own, Karl Amon had a career-best year with more time on the inside and Miles Bergman played 23 games (two as an unused sub) as he finally broke into the side.
Ollie Wines may yet become the Power’s first ever Brownlow Medal winner on Sunday, after he emerged as a genuine star of the competition.
But a 71-point loss at home in a preliminary final, a game the Power weren’t in from the first minute, means the positives from this campaign are quickly forgotten.
The two phrases that are now being associated with the Power’s 2021 campaign in the aftermath of that demolition job by the Bulldogs are “blew it” and “choked”.
And it will be pretty damn hard for the Power to shake those tags.
Port had the ideal preparation — a week off, a near-full strength list and playing against a side that not only had to travel just from Victoria but had stopovers in Tasmania, Brisbane and Perth before finally making their way to Adelaide.
The Bulldogs couldn’t even train on Adelaide Oval the day before the game.
Yet from the moment Tom Liberatore won the first clearance of the night, the Power got nowhere near the Bulldogs.
It was arguably a worse performance than what Geelong dished up against Melbourne 24 hours earlier, given what the Power had going in their favour.
Power great Kane Cornes described the performance as “an embarrassment”.
“All I know this will leave a lasting legacy on a lot of footballers’ careers when they go back and watch the tape,” he said on the Sunday Footy Show.
“The legacy this will leave, there were a lot of footballers who were buried at the Adelaide Oval (on Saturday night).”
Power premiership captain Warren Tredrea tweeted “You only get blown off the park from the first bounce when you aren’t mentally prepared for a ruthless contest. Port had no excuses tonight”.
He then added “indictment on the players, but also a key role of the senior coach”.
The club’s most successful coach, John Cahill, replied on Sunday to the first: “Well said ! (sic)”.
The Power will have to cop this type of stuff for the next couple of days, weeks, months and even until next season, when the question of whether this defeat leaves mental scars on the playing group will be closely examined.
Because the ladder in 2021 and margin of defeat in the preliminary final on Saturday suggest at the very best the Power have either stayed about where they were in 2020, or other teams have significantly improved.
At worst it suggests that the Power have gone backwards in 2021, despite the experience gained from last year and the additions to the side.
Social media and footy blog message boards were again flooded with debate on the suitability of Hinkley, who approaches a decade at Port without a grand final appearance.
After the Power went down to Richmond by a kick in last year’s prelim Hinkley later said he would have “filled the stoppage up a bit more” in the fourth quarter if he had his time again.
It will be fascinating to see what he says could have been done differently to stem the Bulldogs’ onslaught after he reviews this game.
Before the season began Port stuck its neck on the line, with its “Chasing Greatness” vision headlined by three premierships in the next five years.
Hinkley backed it up by declaring “we’re ready” to win a flag.
There’s nothing wrong with ambition and being bold and the Power still have time and the talent to have a serious crack to realise this lofty goal.
But a bloody good effort doesn’t achieve this in the AFL, while it’s also fair to say nothing excuses what they dished up to their loyal army of supporters Saturday night.
Revealed: How a kid from a refugee camp found footy
— Simeon Thomas-Wilson
Port Adelaide will be given credit for pulling off the shock recruit of the year in Aliir Aliir.
But James Ives should be given the credit for recruiting him to football first.
It goes back to about 2008 when Ives and a handful of mates started a footy team at Brisbane’s Kedron State High School - an education facility only a couple of drop punts away from Eagle Farm racecourse in a city mad for rugby league.
To fill a team they had to embark on an ambitious recruiting mission - picking out kids who had never played the sport - and they quickly identified the tall, lanky Aliir.
Tall and lanky, his was not a traditional path into our national game, let alone the country.
Aliir, a proud Dinka man of South Sudanese heritage, was born in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya after his family fled his homeland during a civil war.
They moved to Queensland when he was eight.
“We had only just started our school team and we only had about four or five players or a handful of blokes who had played Aussie rules before,” Ives said.
“Aliir was one of the ones we were keen to get on board.
“I was with him pretty much all the way through high school, from grade eight and his first exposure to Aussie rules was in grade 9 when we were 14 in Queensland and within that year we had got him to the Aspley footy club.”
When Aliir arrived at the Aspley Hornets, there was a level of scepticism about the basketball-obsessed kid.
“Me and one of my mates was actually kicking the ball at school and he just asked me have you played AFL before and I really had no idea what it was,” Aliir told Triple M last week.
“I went to a training at Aspley, which was the club around the corner from my house.
“The coach said had you played before and I said ‘no I don’t know what it is’ and he said ‘well watch a game on the weekend and if you like it come back and if you don’t, come back’.
“And I think it was Nic Nat taking some hangers and there were some crazy goals and I was like, ‘man I think this is the game for me’.”
Ives, who plays in the NEAFL, said Aliir’s ability to turn his hand to a foreign sport, with a peculiar-shaped ball was “incredible”.
”At Kedron High there were a lot of basketball courts so he played a lot, and he wasn’t an incredible basketballer but when he picked up Aussie rules one thing that was pretty noticeable was for big men when it comes to skill acquisition especially kicking it’s really difficult and it looks uncomfortable for most,” he said.
“But for Aliir it looked natural from the get-go and everything he picked up along the way he made it look really easy and that’s really evident now watching him play on the biggest stage with the best players in Australia, it’s just unbelievable.”
ALIIR, now 27 and preparing for Saturday night’s massive preliminary final against Western Bulldogs, helped drive the makeshift Kedron High School team into the state final.
“I think it was in one of those games he was identified by the Lions Academy and he basically moved on from there until he was 17 or 18,” Ives said.
Luke Curran was working with the Lions Academy at the time and said Aliir was raw but his athleticism set him apart.
“We didn’t probably know then what was his best position, he was still playing ruck because he was tall and athletic and he could jump over houses,” Curran said.
Aliir played for Queensland in the 2012 Under-18 national championships.
The ruck position began finding him out because he was yet to hit his 195cm height and was still learning the nuances of the game.
“Everyone always pigeon holed him as a ruckman,” Ives said.
“And I don’t know who it was who initiated the change because up until he was 18 he was a great player but he was just a bit undersized and once he went to that key post role he really flourished and again has taken that transition through to the highest level.”
The person who initiated the change was on the other side of the country.
After getting passed over in the 2012 Draft, Aliir made the decision to join his mother and siblings in Perth.
Aliir has conceded he could have trained a lot harder in Brisbane. But with a new found passion and determination to get to the AFL, friend Josh Simpson put in a good word for him at East Fremantle.
Simpson knew what it took to get to the top, having played two games for the Dockers.
Aliir rocked up at the Sharks and initially played in the ruck, like he had done in Brisbane.
But Colts coach Mark Foster had his doubts. So he moved him to defence.
By the end of the season, just four years after his first game, Aliir was taken by Sydney at pick 44 — the first Sudanese player to be drafted.
HOW ALIIR ALIIR MADE HIS NAME AT THE SWANS
FOR two years Aliir was stuck playing NEAFL for the Swans.
He was handed his first opportunity in Round 6 of the 2016 season and then a second in Round 13.
But it was Round 16 that he finally hit his straps, becoming a regular selection as the Swans marched deep into the finals series.
Sadly, in the preliminary final against Geelong Aliir suffered a low-grade medial strain late in the first quarter and then had to watch from the sidelines as Sydney fell to the drought-breaking Bulldogs in the 2016 grand final a week later.
While the Swans had gone down, Aliir had made a big impact on the footy world.
Ahead of the 2017 season, Champion Data named him as the eighth best key defender in the competition.
Then a series of bad luck and misfortune struck. He played just three games because of poor form, injury and then he was hit with a club-imposed sanction after he overslept and missed a training session.
The 2018 season was a better one for Aliir. He played 12 games - mainly in the second half of the year - as the Swans made an elimination final.
In 2019, he made those in other football departments sit up and notice.
Playing mainly as a defender but with some stints in the ruck, Aliir was the No. 1 intercept player per game.
He was rated as the third best key defender in the competition, averaging five marks and 16 disposals per game.
It led Sydney assistant coach Tadhg Kennelly to say at the end of 2019 of Aliir “the ceiling is … who knows how good of a player he can become”.
But the same issue Aliir had encountered as a junior looked to have set him back again.
Sydney ruckman Sam Naismith went down with another knee injury early on in the 2020 season and Aliir was shifted from a key defender position.
He didn’t perform terribly, but he wasn’t near the impressive force he was on 2019 — or would become for the Power in 2021.
Tom McCartin’s emergence as a key defender also moved him down the pecking order at Sydney.
HOW THE POWER SWOOPED IN TRADE WEEK
PORT’S recruiting team had Aliir’s 2019 campaign at the front of mind when they began to throw up who could add to the Power’s key defensive stocks.
Dougal Howard had been traded to St Kilda and the Power thought he didn’t really fit their defensive style – heavily focused on intercepting and launching attacks.
Aliir on the other hand was perfect, and had the added bonus of being taller than the Power’s key defenders - a criticism Ken Hinkley’s side faced after Tom Hawkins blew them away on the Gold Coast.
So when Sydney, who needed a ruckman with Naismith out but were also facing serious salary cap issues, came asking about Power youngster Peter Ladhams Port saw its chance and proposed a series of moves that would get Aliir to Alberton and West Coast big man Tom Hickey - who has been excellent himself - to the Swans to fix their ruck issue.
Not even Aliir’s jaw being wired shut, due to jaw surgery on wisdom teeth and then had an underbite corrected could hold up the deal.
Once he could actually speak to the Power, who said they saw him as a key defender rather than a ruckman, a deal was quickly done.
Because he was coming from NSW Aliir had to do two weeks quarantine at Sam Powell-Pepper’s recently bought house.
When he could actually train he instantly impressed his new teammates.
“We kind of knew it was coming,” Port star Travis Boak said.
“When we first saw him at pre-season, just his ability to read the ball and to have so much courage to go back into a pack, or any pack and how he reads the flight of the ball.
“It is just a special talent he has.”
Boak can’t explain just how Aliir seems to know where the ball will go time and time again during matches.
“I don’t even know how to answer it because I think it is really difficult to be able to read the ball in flight,” he said.
“And to know where it is going and to know where it is going to land is an art and he does it very, very well.”
Aliir himself has credited playing other sports such as soccer and basketball.
Ives said part of it is just instinct and natural ability.
“I generally don’t think there is another player in the AFL who can time their jump to hit the highest point over and over like him,” he said.
Powell-Pepper said Aliir was benefiting from having clarity around his role on the field.
“As soon as he came over, he fitted in with the boys straight away and he’s been given a lot of freedom to just play the way he wants and he’s a star,” he said.
“We all love him down here and I’m sure all the fans love him too, he’s a gun.
“He just found clarity on his role when he came here, he wasn‘t getting thrown around everywhere, he flourished from there.”
Originally published as AFL 2021: Warren Tredrea on how Port Adelaide players, coaches failed preliminary final test
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