NINE weeks ago, Port Adelaide conceded it highest score (152 points to Brisbane at Adelaide Oval) since the opening round of 2011 (155 points to Collingwood at the Docklands).

Since then, Port Adelaide’s defence – even in conceding key back Esava Ratugolea to attack – has not allowed any rival to break the watershed 100-point barrier.

In nine games (with just one loss, to Gold Coast in south-east Queensland), Port Adelaide has conceded a total of only 562 points at an average of 62.

It is an extraordinary turnaround for a team that was being written off, or at least marked down, at the end of round 16 when that home game – billed as a celebration of the 2004 AFL premiership success – became Port Adelaide’s turn to be tested by the theme that has rocked so many this season, a nightmare result on the field.

A miserly defensive record for two months – to match what Port Adelaide delivered during the last four weeks of the home-and-away season in 2004 – is not built on just what happens in the back 50-metre arc. Although it must be said, Miles Bergman’s part in supporting the tandem worked by key defenders Aliir Aliir and Brandon Zerk-Thatcher is an increasing stand-out feature of Port Adelaide finding new strength rather than being scorched by the ashes of the Brisbane defeat. So should the growing maturity of mid-season rookie draftee Logan Evans be noted in this successful strangling of opposition attacks.

As is often said, team defence begins well before the men in the back 50 have to defend.

Port Adelaide during the past two months has shot to the top of the rankings in so many key performance indicators – in particular the blue-collar measures, such as the ground-ball statistics that exposed Port Adelaide earlier in the season.

That 79-point loss to Brisbane on June 22 – leaving Ken Hinkley’s crew at 8-6 with the need to find at least six wins from nine games – has been followed with Port Adelaide:

RISING from eighth (with a 0.6 percentage lead on Melbourne) to outright second, achieving its fourth top-four finish of the past five seasons – and third home qualifying final against Geelong since 2020,

WINNING six in a row to close the home-and-away series, the best form line of any of the eight teams remaining in the premiership race,

COMPLETING a home-and-away marathon with 16 wins (from 23 games) – the seventh time in 28 seasons since promotion to the national league that Port Adelaide has won 16 games or more in the qualifying series.

AND during the past five weeks the wins have been in games that have tested the spirit and spine of the Port Adelaide squad – the away clash with Carlton; the extraordinary 112-point thrashing of bewildered league leader Sydney; that grind with Melbourne at the MCG; Showdown LVI in the furnace at Adelaide Oval; and on Sunday in Perth, another test of persistence against a Fremantle team playing to stay in the race while Port Adelaide needed to protect home rights to the qualifying final against Geelong.

If ever a team appears tested to the limit and prepared for the extremes of September, it is Port Adelaide. During the 12 seasons of the Hinkley era, only in 2020 – that pandemic-strained year – and this season has Port Adelaide entered a final series with such strong form (each season with eight wins from the last nine games).

While the set-up in attack has been tested by injury (to Jeremy Finlayson, Mitch Georgiades and Todd Marshall during the past two months), defence has ruled on the scoreboard. 

And now there is the test of Port Adelaide’s depth in the back half by the season-ending suspension of All-Australian Dan Houston, the hamstring strain to Kane Farrell and the hobbling of Aliir. Already, there has been the re-appearance in defence on Sunday evening of Darcy Byrne-Jones (an All-Australian in 2020 as a half-back flanker).

The loss of Houston will be more annoying to many. But just as Port Adelaide has appeared to step up amid major tests during the past two months, the game of Australian football also has been catching up with reality during the past two decades.

In another century, the one that ended just 24 years ago, such a classic bump as the Houston block on Izak Rankine in the derby would have featured in text books on Australian football skills and promotional clips about the combative nature of a sport built on physical contact.

Look back to 1996 – Brisbane midfield bull Michael Voss’ bump on Collingwood rival Alan Richardson (on his 31st birthday) at the Gabba. Brownlow Medallist Robert DiPierdomenico rose from his seat enthralled by the bump. The umpires waved play-on, the AFL tribunal never saw Voss and the legend of the “Lion King” grew (even if Brisbane in 1996 was known as Bears). He wore the Brownlow Medal as the league’s fairest and best player four months after that bump.

Today, with concern for player safety that cannot be understated, the Houston bump becomes (as the Brayden Maynard “smother” on Angus Brayshaw late last season) another critical moment for review at AFL House.

We now have a game that has the umpires – like the players – who are forced to react in split-second moments … and a match review officer, Michael Christian, who can roll with no time pressure the angles from 16 cameras with freeze-frame technology. And then the tribunal and appeals board work to guidelines that are far more detailed than anything in the Laws of the Game.

Hence, we have umpires who award free kicks to players who are then suspended from the same incident – as then Port Adelaide captain Tom Jonas knows from last year for tackling Melbourne rival Tom McDonald at Adelaide Oval. A tackle that was rewarded with a holding-the-ball free kick was punished with a match-review suspension for being a dangerous act. So who was wrong?

And how many had it wrong when they misread all that was to come by one horror act against Brisbane at Adelaide Oval?