Port Adelaide lost to Geelong by 21 points at the Adelaide Oval on Thursday night.
It was a high octane affair to kick off Round 13 with plenty of ebbs and flows with the Power ultimately not good enough to deal with the might of the Cats.
Port coach Ken Hinkley saw his side control periods of the contest when laying on four straight goals late in the first quarter, three in a row in the second quarter and three unanswered to kick off the final term.
However, the visiting Cats powered away with six of the last seven goals for a deserving win against an outfit that Hinkley admits is not quite up to the elite level at this present moment.
“We’re good, but we’re not good enough against the best teams in the competition,” he told reporters.
“We can’t hide from that.
“Right now, we’re not good enough against them. We’re good enough to challenge them and get really close.
“The last two teams, Bulldogs and Geelong here, they’ve been games that have been on for most part of the game but we just haven’t been quite efficient or effective enough to win that game at the end of the day.
“So right now, right here we’re just a little bit off those teams. It doesn’t mean we’ll be off them at the end but we’re off them at the moment.”
Further to those words, Hinkley admits it was tricky taking on a Cats side with so many attacking weapons in Tom Hawkins, Jeremy Cameron, Gary Rohan and the returning Patrick Dangerfield, but rued so many wasted chances in the form of missed switch kicking and failing to bring the ball to ground in aerial contests.
“They’ve got some weapons but we caused ourselves some problems whether that be in the contest that we didn’t halve or we turned the ball over when we perhaps shouldn’t,” he added.
Hinkley did lose Todd Marshall to concussion early in the match which he admits threw the side’s structure out forward of centre. The young forward will be forced out for 12 days under the AFL’s concussion protocols.
To make up for that loss, Connor Rozee turned it on with four first-term goals to finish with a bag of five while Charlie Dixon toiled away all night with four majors.
The fifth-placed Power are 1-4 against teams in the top eight far this season, with an average losing margin of 31.5 points in those defeats.
They next meet the Gold Coast Suns at Metricon Stadium next Saturday.
