Friday night had the sort of drama that is usually reserved for Hollywood stories — a club saying goodbye to its longest-serving coach and a beloved 387-game legend at home, while the visitors needed the win to set themselves up for a maiden finals appearance. The established club with a long history against a club still trying to create their own.
In the end, Port gave Ken Hinkley and Travis Boak a send-off with a four-point win, 10.11 (71) to 9.13 (67), leaving Gold Coast to sweat through a mid-week decider for their first-ever September ticket. The place shook, the guard of honour was pure goosebump fodder, and the agony and ecstasy contrasts between the teams could not have been more apparent.
Recent form
Port Adelaide
The results column had been a horror series for Port leading into this match: five straight losses, the latest a nine-goal thumping from Carlton. The Match Review Officer added insult to injury by suspending Ollie Wines for three games, ruling him out of the farewell fixture.
The broader story isn’t kinder — injuries have gutted Port’s depth over the last month, with Miles Bergman (shoulder), Jase Burgoyne (plantaris), and Jason Horne-Francis (foot) among the long-term outs. With Wines out and some of their most exciting young talent in the stands, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Port were just going to go through the motions to close the books on 2025, but with Connor Rozee playing game 150, adding to Boak and Hinkley’s farewells, the obligatory rendition of “Never tear us apart” rarely sounded so loud.
Gold Coast
The Suns are coming off a reality check, outmuscled by GWS at People First Stadium. They’ve been a top-eight calibre outfit in many games, but looked completely out of their depth at some crucial points in the season.
A win here and they could have cruised into a top-eight spot no matter who wins out of Freo and the Bulldogs, but for now, the ladder math is still needy enough to keep them ninth on percentage.
Ins and Outs
Port Adelaide
In: Harrison Ramm (debut), Rory Atkins, Ewan Mackinlay (debut)
Out: Josh Sinn (calf), Ollie Wines (suspension), Will Lorenz (omitted)
Sub last week: Christian Moraes
Ramm is the 202-centimetre key defender taken with pick 3 in the mid-season draft — bouncy reach, decent wheels, and exactly the sort of “throw him in the ring and see if he can hang with the big boys” debut that farewell nights seem to produce. He was matched up on Ben King most of the night, and didn’t while King got three majors, Ramm didn’t look out of place.
Mackinlay arrived from North Adelaide as a mid/forward with speed and a taste for scoreboard pressure, and he showed his speed and a taste for contact. Atkins adds experience and a nice touch of symmetry playing against his old club, even if he’ll start in the sub vest.
Gold Coast
In: Lachlan Gulbin (debut)
Out: Nick Holman (omitted)
Sub last week: Alex Sexton
The Suns also juggle discipline and opportunity — Alex Davies is suspended, which stings at stoppage, but Academy product Lachie Gulbin debuts to bring fresh legs and tackle pressure to a forward mix that already runs at the sort of speed that you usually only see when an ADHD kid has had seven Red Bulls and needs to pee.
The Start
You could feel the occasion tightening Port’s shoulders early. Gold Coast owned field position, but couldn’t buy a finish: 3.6 in the first term when 5.4 would’ve told a different story.
It opened like a finals dress rehearsal for one team and a eulogy rehearsal for the other — and then promptly inverted. Gold Coast owned the geometry early: Witts planted flags at stoppage, Noble and Fiorini ran the back-half conveyor belt, and the Suns kept Port hemmed in. But the finishing was pure self-sabotage: 3.6 to 2.2 at quarter time when the play probably deserved a two-goal buffer more. Aliir lived three lives in 10 minutes — appeared to be nudged over the fence, then whistled twice off the ball — and Ken Hinkley looked like he might finish his tenure with an all-time spray directed at his players, the umpires, the crowd and probably the coaches in the box telling him that the knock-off beers scheduled for half time had been intercepted by the Fox Footy commentary team, in an effort to handle the three hour assignment of listening to Garry Lyon and Jonathan Brown violate the English language.
Still, Port hung on, largely because the Suns refused to turn territorial dominance into big-boy-sized scores.
Second term, same script with better penmanship. Gold Coast stretched it to 6.10 to 4.7 at the half by continuing to win that first kick away from congestion and finding King or Long one-out often enough to keep the locals twitchy. The issue — and it would prove fatal — was the last kick: shallow entries, narrow miss after narrow miss, and a sense that the door was being politely propped open for a team that had settled the early tension and was starting to find the balance between emotion and performance.
Port’s resistance came from effort and timing rather than polish: Boak set a physical tone (nine tackles for the night), Rozee and Butters kept punching at the bruise, and Mackinlay’s debut cameo — the “slung 720” tackle and first-goal moment — gave the crowd something to believe in beyond nostalgia.
The second half
Port’s adjustment was to run a little leaner rather than anything major. They took a little intensity out of every moment and instead applied it only when it’d matter. Less time standing on the toes of your opponent when the ball is still in the crowd and more time harassing them when it actually mattered.
The third term swung on speed and responsibility: Rozee’s captain’s quarter (he finished with 34 and a goal) wasn’t built on highlight-reel moments, but constant, relentless effort and quality execution. Every team needs their workhorses, and Rozee showed why his club rates him so highly.
Butters pitched in and turned every 50-50 into a Port ball, stacking eight marks and eight tackles onto a 35-touch night that showed just how much pride he has in pulling on the guernsey. The Power went 4.3 to 1.0 in the term to flip a 15-point deficit into a six-point lead — the hinge on which the whole night turned. Around them, Aliir reset the line after his chaotic start, Sweet and the mids began reading Witts’ taps rather than trying to win them, and Georgiades started finding his timing on the way to a match that will be a wake up call to backmen around the league.
The debutants held their nerve when the tempo went into overdrive. Ramm’s first assignment was essentially “don’t let Ben King end the farewell party”; he conceded moments (King still finished with three) but halved enough balls and recovered with his quick ten metre sprint to keep the Suns star working up the ground. Mackinlay gave Port those little surges you notice more in a grind: pressure on the exit, a chase that forces a sideways kick, the sort of repeat efforts that don’t trend on social but shift territory all the same. Gulbin, on the other side, did what he was picked to do — harass Port’s rebound — but as the entries got messier, his chances to cash in dried up with them.
The finish
Not a person dared risk a visit to the toilet at Adelaide Oval, lest they miss the defining moment to seal or steal the game. Ben King nudged the Suns back in front early in the last; Georgiades answered with two moments that felt like an exorcism — one from a hotly debated off-the-ball free on Mac Andrew, the next a big pack grab that landed like a gavel. Jy Farrar set up a grandstand ending.
Gold Coast played as the finals-ready bully they should be, but Port were the plucky little computer science kid who spends his Wednesday nights learning BJJ and just refused to back down or accept any level of intimidation.
Boak tackled like a man knowing that he’d have plenty of time to recover from every bruise, ache and strain. Hinkley looked equal parts proud and drained as Port managed to keep Gold Coast from getting maximum reward from their shots on goal and played keeping off in the last three minutes. The final siren scenes were what you’d expect for a minor premiership rather than celebrating the end of an era at Alberton, but footy is nothing if not a game of emotion and history, and we witnessed both in this game.
Port got the four points, they chaired off a champion and farewelled a coach that I think in time will be fondly remembered for his love and devotion for the club rather than the sneaky blokes putting up requests for his sacking on the club sign.
Controversial moment
Let’s talk about That Free. With 12 minutes left, Georgiades and Mac Andrew jostled off the ball; the whistle goes Port’s way; Georgiades slots his third. Soft? Many said so. Damaging? Absolutely. Add an earlier sequence where Aliir Aliir was shoved over the fence, then later pinged twice off the ball, and you had a whole subplot where the rulebook felt like interpretive dance. Coaches and commentators were… unconvinced.
There will be plenty rightly pointing to this as another episode of umpiring inconsistency, and they do have a point, but, like they say in the fight game “Don’t leave it in the hands of the judges.” 13 behinds, with multiple from the last half being very gettable and a 6.10 scoreline in the first half shows that there were loads of chances where the game could have been won.
Whether the umps were right or wrong won’t matter in a week, but Gold Coast letting Port back into the match will be a very important learning lesson if the Suns expect to make an impact in the finals.
Midfield matchup
This was a Rozee-Butters production with an ensemble cast. Rozee’s third term was a captain’s sermon — 34 and a goal overall — while Butters gave one of those lovely, viciously complete games: 35 touches, eight marks, eight tackles. They weren’t walking clearances out the front — Gold Coast’s big bodies still leaned on it — but Port’s pair turned half-chances into territory, and territory into scoreboard pressure.
On the Suns’ side, Noah Anderson and Matt Rowell kept swinging (21 apiece), Brayden Fiorini got busy at the edges, and Touk Miller’s two-way running tried to hold the structure together. It just wasn’t quite enough when the game turned trench-warfare ugly. Rowell had a decent game by regular standards, but considering he’s a player that is talented enough to break open a game off his own boot, his moderate impact at this time of year is a bit concerning. If he’s not 100%, I’d understand it, footy seasons are long, but if that is the case he should probably have a rest against the Dons.
Ruck Battle
I’ve written about Witts and Sweet quite a few times in 2025. I really like the way both go about it. They’re modern ruckmen, but with an old school flavour that I enjoy watching. The funny part was that watching this match up helped me connect Witts with another ruck that I enjoyed watching in Matthew Primus. Witts hasn’t had the same impact yet, but Primus was able to operate much of his best years under a ruleset that was a bit more tolerant of big meaty men slapping meat.
For a half, it looked like Witts was in control, with Sweet bouncing off the turf and eating forearms at stoppage. But Port adjusted the stoppage structure at half-time, and Jordon Sweet started grappling better to move himself into smarter spots, bodying Witts under the ball and letting Rozee/Butters play the sneaky sherring thief at ground level. They’d read the hand, win the ground ball, flip field position. It was less pretty than effective, and exactly what the moment demanded.
Gold Coast tried to swing the momentum with a tag — Ethan Read off the bench to freshen the ruck rotation and stretch Port with that mobile, ruck-forward look. It worked in patches (and he even snuck forward for a goal), but when the match turned trench-ugly in the third, Sweet and the Port mids did the old rope-a-dope: absorb the first hit, counter on the deck, and march it out the front. By the last quarter, Witts was still winning the ball-ups, but Port were winning the next two acts of the scene — the bump, then the exit. That’s where the match flipped.
If you’re assigning belts: Witts takes the hit-out count and the aesthetics — the clean taps, the on-field generalship and basic big man bulldozing, but Sweet and Port take the finesse — the opportunistic sharking, the repeat body blows that turned the Suns’ ruck advantage into nothing more than a bruise on the stats sheet.
I really want to give it to Witts. I think he’s a massively underrated ruck that gets overlooked because he’s not quite as mobile as Gawn, Grundy or English, and not quite as likely to piledrive his opponents as Xerri, Nankervis or Briggs, but he’s a fantastic balance between the two extremes.
But… A Ruck’s job is to get the ball into the hands of his mids. Sweet did that better than Witts. Sure, part of it was in just negating Witts being able to choose his zones, but that’s a Ruck tactic that’s been in the game since the first bloke with a basketball background pulled on a pair of Puma Kings.
So Sweet gets my last regular season Ruck crown.
The Stats that Sting
- Scoreboard waste: Gold Coast 9.13 — ten first-half behinds turned scoreboard pressure into a giant shrug. This game was there. It blinked.
- Captain & lieutenant: Rozee 34 and 1. Butters 35/8/8. That’s a leadership clinic disguised as a stat line. When Gold Coast needed some on-field generalship of their own, Rowell, Miller and Fiorini seemed more concerned with their own games. Witts tried, but he’s not the guy they all turn to. Very concerning for Suns fans.
- The spearhead: Georgiades 4 — two in the last, including the lightning-rod free and the pack hang. Big moment, big boy football.
- Crowd factor: 40,897 turned a dead rubber into a culture-defining game. Well done to all who rocked up and gave the game the atmosphere it deserved. That sort of engagement is what helps clubs trade in players almost as much as the salary cap does.
- Quarter swing: Port 4.3 to 1.0 in the third. That six-goal turnaround from half time to mid-last was the hinge the whole night swung on.
Debutant watch (how they actually went)
- Ewan Mackinlay (Port) — Kicked his first AFL goal off a ferocious tackle that would’ve brought a smile to every Port fan in attendance. Brought speed, chase, and the kind of joyful malice forward lines need. You notice guys like this even when the stat sheet is a little thin because it’s plain to see when someone is playing the game, and when someone loves the game.
To my eyes, Mackinlay looks like the latter — a kid that walked to school tossing a beat up old yellow Faulkner and bouncing it on the footpath as he walked to school dreaming of the day he’d run out onto the big stage. Well, he got his wish, and from this small sample, he wasn’t found wanting. Hope we can see a lot more of him in 2026.
- Harrison Ramm (Port) — Trial by King. Conceded a couple, halved more than a couple, and never looked spooked. For a pick-3 mid-seasoner who only learned everyone’s names on Thursday, that’s a serious tick.
- Lachlan Gulbin (Gold Coast) — Short minutes, hard yards. A couple of chases that forced Port wide; not much shine with ball in hand, but the role was “be annoying.” Box ticked.
Final thoughts
There’s a version of this where Gold Coast kick straight and we talk about maturity and milestones. Instead, we got a Port story: Boak tackling like he was playing one of the Queensland footy codes, Hinkley teary and proud, a crowd that refused to let the night go wrong, and a pair of midfield stars who turned romance into results. For the Suns, it’s not a morality play — it’s a wake-up. September is still on the table, but finals require the kind of cold-blooded accuracy and on-field leadership that doesn’t desert you when you are trying to create history.
Friday was a lesson. Wednesday decides whether anyone was listening.
Next up
Port close the book on the Hinkley-Boak era with something they’ll bottle for years. Gold Coast get one last life: Essendon at home in the mid-week catch-up. Win and you’re in. Lose, and this becomes the longest four points of your off-season. My money is on Gold Coast by a lot, but that’s less about them and more that Essendon are just looking to shut the book on this season as quickly as possible.
Gold Coast by 55.
