“He was voted the toughest player in the AFL by his peers, and he couldn’t go out there and play again … it must be reasonably sore for Zak to be like that.”

The injury was part of a sour night for the home team, as they watched a 20-point half-time deficit balloon to 84 points by the final siren as Geelong ran in waves and found holes aplenty inside its forward 50.

After being bundled out in consecutive finals last year, Hinkley is again sure to feel the heat ahead of next week’s semi-final against the winner of Friday night’s contest between the Western Bulldogs and Hawthorn.

Hinkley said he would remain positive about his team’s chances to turn things around, conceding they didn’t handle Geelong’s heat as well as they needed to.

“It’s about our coaching group and it’s about our playing group and our footy club. I know, and I get it, that it falls back to the head coach … this is all of us doing this, this is all of us trying to achieve something together,” Hinkley said.

“The season suggests we’ve been better than that consistently. We have not turned up in a final and played the way we wanted to, that’s fact.”

Hinkley said Port Adelaide had no choice but to move on quickly ahead of another match at Adelaide Oval.

They generated 53 inside 50s to Geelong’s 57, but from midway through the second quarter, the match was never close as the Cats again proved too clean and too precise in September.

Hinkley backed his decision to select Charlie Dixon over Todd Marshall – who has barely played in the past eight weeks – and said it would be unlikely they would make many changes next week.

“We’ve got to go back to what we think is more like us,” he said.

“Our last five or six weeks, we haven’t been like that.

“The group’s been pretty consistent with what they’ve been able to do and I’m going to trust they can be as consistent again, as soon as next week.

“I try to look at things in a positive way as best as I can.