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FWC on Sport Nation guideCrows under fire from club great after Showdown failure
Abby Crozier • June 30th, 2026 3:20 pm
Dual Adelaide premiership captain Mark Bickley has criticised the tactics of Crows coach Matthew Nicks.
In a Saturday night Showdown, the Crows fell last weekend to crosstown rivals Port Adelaide, entering Round 16 as a top six team only to be taken down by the 15th-placed Power.
With Nicks summarising the 26-point defeat as a “reality check” for his players, Crows legend Bickley has rebuked the coaching philosophy, laying out his two cents on SEN's SA Breakfast.
“Those are the words that shocked me the most – that maybe it was a 'reality check'," said Bickley.
“A reality check means that you actually got ahead of yourself and you were bought back to reality - which is that maybe you’re not as good as what you thought you were.
“I just don’t understand how going to into that game last week, and it was clear, that Adelaide was shocked by the level of pressure that Port Adelaide brought.
“To me, that is a failing on all the players, all the coaching, and the preparation. The one thing that Port Adelaide had was the ability to come out and be rabid and fierce and surprise Adelaide. How Adelaide could not be ready for that, I do not know.
“I would have thought that Nicks and his coaching staff would have been saying all week, 'Boys, everyone’s saying this is a 10-goal win, everyone is writing Port Adelaide off, we’ve all heard them say it’s the worst Port Adelaide team that’s been picked'.
“(Instead), you could argue that they looked a little bit complacent.
“It was alarm bells, I would have thought. As a coach, you would have had your players wound up. Do not let the genie out of the bottle, do not give them a sniff at the start.
“I just don’t think that happened, Port brought the heat and they kept it on all night, Adelaide just did not respond to it.”
Continuing his critique of Saturday’s defeat, Bicks picked apart Adelaide's inability to deal with Port's most damaging players.
“The thing that was surprising to me as well is that its common knowledge that the threats to Adelaide were their (Port's) two gun-midfielders, Zak Butters and Jason Horne-Francis," he added.
“Horne-Francis is 12th in the coaches award and Butters is 3rd or 4th, so Port Adelaide are the only club that have two midfielders in the top twelve in the coaches award - which says they are two of the best players in the comp.
“Take that away, and it gets very thin after that, they’ve got Aliir Aliir being a great player down the back, Mitch Georgiades is a great player up forward, but they would be your major threats.
“When you see the footage in the first quarter of Butters just running around with no one on him, and no one sort of accountable to him – and Horne-Francis sort of just doing what he wanted out of the middle - it was quite hard to comprehend how you could let the two biggest threats just do whatever they wanted to do.
“As a caveat, sometimes you do have a plan, and that can come unstuck because people get lost or someone gets tackled and they’re on the ground and the man you’re on runs away.
"But looking at some of the footage, where Butters was isolated for a minute and a half, and Adelaide are just watching him run around with no player on him at all. If they had a plan, it wasn’t a good one, or it wasn’t executed anywhere near where it needed to be – that’s the first thing.
“They can’t do that; they need to put a bit of body into it and get them off balance. Do some things that don’t allow them to dominate like they were.
“The Crows were absolutely annihilated out of the centre square, and murdered in the ruck, yet continued to have a free player on their defensive side. They gave Port Adelaide a free player on their defensive side – it’s just Russian roulette.
“If your ruckman is getting killed, why would you leave Horne-Francis or Butters on their own on the defensive side of the stoppage, so they get a tap and they’re running directly at goal."
Adelaide will be given a chance to redeem themselves this weekend against 16th-placed West Coast at Optus Stadium on Friday night.
