AFL Round 21 Port Adelaide v Sydney: All the news and analysis as the Power stuns the Swans with incredible first half
Port fans are on top of the world after their team’s utter demolition of the top of the table Swans on Saturday night and Sydney coach John Longmire can’t believe the margin either.
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Shellshocked Sydney coach John Longmire was left bewildered by the struggling Swans’ complete inability to push back and defend themselves after getting punched in the face by the rampaging Power on the way to a record 112-point drubbing.
Sydney’s run of poor form hit a new low at Adelaide Oval on Saturday night where the visitors trailed by 71 points before registering a score, and managed just one goal in a diabolical first half, with the shock result making it five losses from the past six games.
It was the highest losing margin in Longmire’s decorated 14-season coaching tenure, and dropped the ladder leaders to a 14-6 record with three matches remaining before finals.
“It’s completely and utterly unacceptable … it’s not up to standard,” Longmire said.
“We’ve been in every game this year, until last week, and today just didn’t seem like it had a baseline to it at all in any area.
“We just didn’t come to compete and that’s the very essence of the game, if you don’t come to compete and fight you get shown up, it doesn’t matter who you play.
“We’ve played three good teams in good form over the past three weeks, but you need to have a baseline and we didn’t have that tonight.
“We tried to shift players around, but in the end the very essence of trying to win the contest, to put pressure on the opposition, leads to better skills, and better everything, but we just had nothing out there.
“That was the disappointing aspect … there’s got to be a fiercer push back than that.
“To put in a performance like that, (bewildered) would be one to describe it.”
Slow starts continue to dog the Swans, who have not won a first quarter in their past five losses and have scored just one behind combined in their past two opening terms.
“We’ve talked about it at training, we’ve tried different methods before the game, in the end we need to stop talking about it and get on with it,” Longmire said of shaking the sluggish starts.
“We’re not changing, and we’ve just got to be fiercer in the contest early in the game … it’s as simple as that.
“You have to win more 50-50 balls, if they get the ball out and it goes into the opposition forward line we’ve got to be better at stopping that and we’re not, at the moment, in first quarters.
“That’s putting us on the back foot enormously and we’ve got to be better than that.”
The Swans now face a fight to hang onto top spot, which would have been hard to foresee when they were flying high three wins clear on top of the ladder after Round 17.
Longmire denied his charges had become comfortable or complacency had set in, and remains confident his side can bounce back.
“It’s hard, unless you’re a mind reader, to work out exactly if that’s the case, but our feeling internally is that that’s not the case,” the coach said.
“But when you see a performance like that, I’m like anyone else, you sit there and say ‘Why is that? Where did that come from?’
“Now it’s up to us to come up with a solution and we’ll work through that as a coaching group and a leadership team.
“But, as it sits tonight, it’s just absolute disappointment in our performance.
“I’m not sure where it came from, so we need to work through it and see what comes out the other side.
“We get another chance, next week, to get things right.”
THE UNBELIEVABLE NUMBERS BEHIND PORT’S STUNNING SWANS BLITZ
Port Adelaide fans, coaches and players must have thought they were dreaming.
John Longmire and Sydney probably felt like they were trapped in a nightmare.
In a start no one saw coming and had people looking for record books, the Power led the first-placed Swans 71-0 at Adelaide Oval on Saturday night.
In a result no one would have imagined, Port went on to annihilate a listless Sydney by 112 points.
The blitz was as stunning as it was brilliant for Ken Hinkley’s side – and incredibly concerning for the visitors.
At quarter-time, Port led 7.3 (45) to no score.
Sydney took until 17 minutes into the second term to get on the scoreboard and 23 minutes into that quarter to boot its opening goal.
At half-time, it was Port 13.8 (86) to the Swans’ 1.3 (9), the type of bizarre scoreline that would have left people not at the game wondering if there was an error.
Only once before in Port’s 27-year AFL history had it kept a team scoreless in the first term – Hawthorn in round 11, 2017.
The Power kept the Hawks goalless to half-time at Adelaide Oval that night, before the visitors finished with 7.5 in a 51-point defeat.
Hawthorn finished 12th that year and Port made an elimination final.
What made Saturday night’s smashing so astonishing was it came who it was against.
Sure, Sydney had lost four of its previous five games going into the match, while the Power was 4-1 during that span.
But in this tight, topsy-turvy season, it would have surprised absolutely no one if the ladder-leading Swans had a comfortable win.
Instead, Port blew them off the park.
Hinkley’s team built its lead off manic pressure, winning the contest and slick, unselfish football.
Even as the margin grew, the Power kept looking for better options inside 50 rather than got greedy.
The Swans played meekly and without dare, but their biggest issue was at the coalface.
Longmire called the first half “terrible”.
“I can’t really describe how bad it was,” the Swans coach told Fox Footy.
“At some point you’ve got to start to win a contest.
“Serving up that sort of stuff is not acceptable.”
The loss ended up being Longmire’s biggest as Swans coach across his 327 games.
Hinkley would have taken a one-point win pre-match.
By the end the Power was chasing all-important percentage and had jumped to second on the ladder.
“Not in their wildest dreams would they have been thinking there’d be a 13 goals to one scoreline,” Mark Ricciuto said on Fox Footy.
“This is going to give them huge momentum heading into September.”
As for the Swans, the magnitude of the defeat and such a lull so close to the finals will raise plenty of questions about how they will recover.
“You don’t lose by this much if you’re having a genuine crack,” Ricciuto said.
Scoreboard
POWER 7.3 13.8 17.9 22.16 (148)
SWANS 0.0 1.3 3.4 5.6 (36)
JASON PHELAN’S BEST POWER: Drew, Butters, Wines, Houston, Rozee, Horne-Francis, Georgiades, Dixon, Rioli, Farrell. SWANS: Gulden, Heeney, Roberts, Ch Warner, Blakey, Grundy.
GOALS POWER: Georgiades 4, Rioli 4, Dixon 3, Houston 2, F Evans 2, Sweet, Rozee, Ratugolea, Horne-Francis, Byrne-Jones, Boak, Wines. SWANS: McLean 2, Heeney, Hayward, Adams.
INJURIES POWER: Nil. SWANS: Nil.
UMPIRES: Power, DeBoy, Nicholls, Dore
37,501 at ADELAIDE OVAL
PLAYER OF THE YEAR
JASON PHELAN’S VOTES
3 Drew (Port)
2 Butters (Port)
1 Wines (Port)
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