The Power have endured an eventful fortnight of retirements, resignations as well as the appointment of a new CEO.
President Greg Boulton added his name to the list of senior staffers to leave Alberton on Friday and addressed the players ahead of the day’s training session.
Port tried hard but couldn’t bring home the win in veteran Michael Wilson’s farewell game last weekend.
However, Cripps said they couldn’t afford to become reliant on external motivators.
“Greg addressed the players before training and was quite emotional in terms of his thoughts and contribution to the club,” Cripps said.
“If that’s a little bit more incentive for the players [so be it], but you’d be disappointed if you’ve got to wheel out Michael Wilson one week to get a good effort and then you’ve got to wheel out the president, who is leaving, the next week to get a good effort.
“We’d like to think our players are better than that and can find some self-motivation. That’s what we work on and we certainly don’t want to be rolling our gimmicks each week to get the players across the line.”
Young forward Justin Westhoff, who is recovering from a knee injury, completed training and is expected to line up alongside his brother Matthew for just the second time.
Port Adelaide will also add another branch to its family tree on Saturday when Marlon Motlop joins cousin Daniel in the team.
Motlop is expected to play across half-forward in his debut and Cripps was confident the 18-year-old, who has been playing in the SANFL reserves, could adapt to the pace of AFL.
“You can easily look at it and say, ‘Well he’s only been playing in the twos’, but Marlon’s been averaging nearly 25 possessions a game and we saw what he did with us in the pre-season,” Cripps said.
“He trained with us Wednesday night and was very good. We think he’s just going to be one of those players that, the higher he steps up in terms of level of competition, the better he’ll be able to adapt.
“We certainly want to get people into the team that make good decisions and use the ball well and he certainly ticks all those boxes.
Cripps lamented his side’s ability to get the ball inside 50m efficiently this season and said a lack of confidence had played a part in the considerable decline from last year.
“We think a little bit [of our poor entry inside 50m] has to do with self-belief and confidence. If you look at the personnel who were playing last year to this year, it hasn’t changed that significantly,” he said.
“So you need to look a little bit at where their self-belief and confidence is at the moment and you don’t have to be Einstein to work out it wouldn’t be high.”
