Good evening all, it's not quite a wonderful Swans week with Port Adelaide stealing the chocolates on Sunday night. The Easter bunny came for all and despite it visiting us on Sunday night, Port raided the nest and stole all the eggs.
Franklin backed up his excellent Eagles performance with another bag of 4 and was arguably Sydney's best player, alongside Parker. The Swans dominated the first half of the match, well up in clearances, hit outs, inside 50s and disposals, but couldn't translate it on the scoreboard.
The old scoreboard pressure adage played true as Port Adelaide made their predictable come back in the third quarter. Switching Dixon into the ruck completely changed the flow of the game and the Swans couldn't deal with it. Out defenders started making uncharacteristic mistakes and the Swans fell to pieces.
We still hung tough in the last and pulled it close, kicking the first two goals to bring it within 4 points. Port responded with the last three around the midway point of the last quarter and ran out comfortable winners.
Its not as if they didn't deserve to win, they did, but the Swans should have won the match. They dominated the first half but their delivery forward of centre was dreadful, and they constantly turned it over. Disposal efficiency was down across the ground with captain Josh Kennedy one of the main culprits.
It looked slippery at times and Sydney certainly played like it was wet weather football, kicking the ball along the ground, but Port made a mockery of the conditions. They were clean and clinical and drove the ball with precision. Big mistakes in the second and third quarters gifted Port Adelaide goals and kept them close, and when they finally capitalised, they kicked 7-goals-to-2 in the third quarter.
Longmire said in the post-match press conference that the Swans made too many basic errors and it ultimately cost them.
“They pressured pretty well, we made some basic errors and they put pressure on - 10 tackles inside our forward 50, they did pretty well in that area but we made some errors,” Longmire said.
“You need to be a bit more in front, like we should have been at half-time, but in that last quarter we got within 4 points. We got back but just didn't continue on.”
It was a bit un-Swans like on Sunday night, but you've still got to look at the match in the context of the season and try not to go over the top with reactions and emotions. It's easy to let it run it for a while after a home game loss, but it's not as though Port Adelaide are Carlton or Fremantle from last year. They're a good team and they're definitely going to be in the Premiership equation.
In this weeks' episode, I'm joined by Rowan from BigFooty. We recorded the cast early in the day before Hawthorn and Geelong faced off. Hindsight is a wonderful thing because it was a titanic clash, easily the match of the round. With Hawthorn winning, it goes to show that 3 players don't make a team.
We've switched Podcast hosts this week to an Australian provider. It won't make a difference with the feed from iTunes, but if you subscribe to the feed url, please make sure you use this one going forward. We were using Blubrry before, but since Whooshkaa is Australian, free and is generally a better platform, it really was a simple decision. So check out our show channel here and follow on your desktop or favourite podcast feed app.
You may have noticed something else new this week - we've started publishing our Player of the Year votes. Last season we ran a silent vote and found that it was a reasonably good guide for predicting the Bob Skilton Medalist. After each match we will be publishing our 5-to-1s along with the leaderboard.
Anyway, in this episode Rowan and I review the Port Adelaide match and the round of football that was. We look ahead at Round 3 against Greater Western Sydney and discuss the injuries and suspensions from the current round.
It's another great episode, so give it a listen and get your questions and comments to us ahead of next weeks' episode - more new on that to come.
Happy Monday, enjoy the week and the episode! As always, hit us up on social media using the tag @theswansblog, or the hash tag #SwansCast.
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