Port Adelaide champion Kane Cornes has shed some more light on the “frosty” relationship he shared with former coach Matthew Primus towards the end of his stint in charge of the Power.
Cornes and Primus were teammates at Alberton during Port’s successful era in the early 2000s, but later fell out with each other and their relationship has “never been the same”, Cornes admitted earlier this year.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Kane Cornes shares most ‘depressing’ time of his career.
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Primus, who coached Port to 13 wins from 47 games between 2010-2012, accused Cornes of “leaking information to the media” during the 2012 season — his last in charge at the Power — and the pair have had a strained relationship since.
But the tension had been boiling away from the previous year when Cornes was told mid-season that he wouldn’t be required anymore.
“Towards the end of the season, Matty Primus said I was being moved on at the end of the season with a couple of years to go my contract,” Cornes told The Agenda Setters.
“The club couldn’t afford to pay me out, which meant that I had to stay at the club.
“So, I went to my exit meeting, Cam Falloon was our fitness boss — great guy, great fitness coach. (He) started to go through all my numbers and GPS and games played and all that.
“I said, ‘Cam, excuse me, don’t worry about the stats — there’s an elephant in the room here: the coach doesn’t want me, I don’t want to be here, so how are we going to play this?’
“I said, ‘I’m going to be the last to training and the first to leave for the next two years because the coach doesn’t want me’, (then) got up, slammed the door and walked out, and we really didn’t speak to each other for the whole of the next pre-season.
“It was really frosty and it wasn’t a great working relationship, and it was a very depressing time at the footy club.”
Cornes readily admitted that “it was a bit selfish” of him.
“It was, but that’s what you do when you’re told you’re not wanted and you feel like you don’t belong and you don’t have a home and the coach doesn’t want you,” he said.
“You spit the dummy, and I did spit the dummy.
“I’m just being honest.”
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As it turned out, Primus was sacked after Round 19 in 2012 and Cornes won the club’s best and fairest that year before playing a key role in the team for the final three years of his career under Ken Hinkley.
Speaking earlier this year, Cornes recalled Primus’s last game.
“We played the Giants when they were full of 18-year-olds,” he said in April.
“The vision kept going to Matthew Primus in the box. He left the box and was waiting for us in the changerooms.
“And it was the roughest review I’ve ever had. He essentially put his hand up and said, ‘I’m done, you guys have’ — and he used some expletives — ‘screwed me over’.”
Cornes said he felt personally attacked when Primus started throwing out some extraordinary accusations.
“He accused the players of leaking information to the media, and I had the feeling he was directing those comments at me, which I took really personally, I was quite offended by that. But you can understand the pressure that he was under,” he said.
“By the time we landed in Adelaide, Matthew Primus had been sacked and Garry Hocking came in, and he sent us for the most brutal beach recovery you’ve ever seen the following week where players almost had hypothermia in the middle of winter.
“That was the most depressed I’ve ever been in my time at Port Adelaide.”
The 300-game Power champion said he and Primus have since broken bread, but have never really rekindled any friendship they did have.
“We’ve spoken; the relationship’s never been the same,” Cornes said.
“We weren’t that tight anyway, but I’ve got respect now for the situation he was put in, and how hard it would have been for him.”
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