Port Adelaide too good in Round 14

I think the word frustrated is the one that comes to mind out of our round 14 clash with Port Adelaide. It was certainly that during the game, after the game, and hasn’t changed after watching the game back and looking for the best learnings to take out. We can try and search for reasons, but in reality while the numbers and statistics suggested we had the better of the day, our eyes told us that we were far from desperate enough, out worked and hunted in the key moments and most certainly didn’t use the ball well enough going inside 50 and in our shots at goal. Port Adelaide deserved the win and that is disappointing from our perspective.

We gave ourselves enough chances to start the game well in terms of the score board but what is too much of a common occurrence at times, inaccurate goal kicking is costly. Unfortunately, that didn’t improve over the day with some set shots that just need to be kicked in these games going by the wayside. We were able to dominate forward territory for periods but were poor in our delivery into our forward 50 both in execution and decisions playing into their hands far too often. To add to that frustration, they were able to get forward and score to easily a few times that compounded what we were not able to do the other way. There are no excuses we were not good enough in all aspects of the game and the responsibility is on us as coaches and the playing group to improve considerably.

Our Reserves group recorded arguably their best win for the year, with a few injuries and unavailability throughout the group it was a really young group taking the field and while they found themselves behind for the majority of the day against the top of the table Norwood team, they stuck to their process, continued to apply pressure and defend strongly and eventually were able to find some score reward and a fantastic win. Credit to the group, I have mentioned a few times about the quality of our groups training over a number of weeks and this group is certainly producing this consistently in games. We have some guys in the group that are playing league level football and will be well in contention this weekend.

The great thing about football is we move on pretty quickly, review strongly on Monday night, recover well and the crack into training during the week and look forward to Sturt this Sunday at Unley Oval. While it was a disappointing day on Saturday, we have been able to place ourselves in a strong position in the competition. We certainly know what we are capable of and what our best football looks like. There is a lot of work going on daily to find that consistently, and with 5 rounds remaining we will keep pushing to finish as high as we can on the table.

I look forward to seeing a strong group of our supporters at Unley on Sunday arvo.

Go The Bays

– Darren Reeves, Senior Coach

Goals: McBean (2), Reynolds, Bailey, Gerloff, Kitschke

Best Players: Holder, Proud, McBean, Curran, Lovelock