NOT SURE HOW MUCH HINKLEY IS PAYING THIS GUYS FOR PR
“I think, the people around Port Adelaide, and I’ll separate them from the club themselves, the people around Port Adelaide need to calm the farm a bit.
You can wish and hope and think and pray that you should be making finals, and then you can coldly assess what’s happened against what the planning was and you can go, ‘this is exactly where we should be. we are on a path, we are a fair way down the path’.
You want to see where the path leads? Sit tight. Stop the agitation. Stop the unrest. Stop this ridiculous idea that you’re this old SANFL club that should rule the world. That’s not you. That’s not you in the AFL. You scratch and you claw for everything that you’re worth. And you put a plan in place and you follow that plan through.
The plan is, go to the draft, get a critical mass of young players, integrate them, have a good season — this is a good season, this is a clear pass, a clear pass what they have done — it improves next year on a natural trajectory.
And then you make your judgements. You’ve got a coach who’s got a trigger in his contract next year, so if they don’t make the finals and you think they should, then we say ‘thanks, I don’t think that path is going to lead us to where we’re going’.
