PORT ADELAIDE might be out of the NAB Cup, but don’t expect them to be taking it easy over the next few weeks.

Round one of the regular season is only 30 days away and midfielder Domenic Cassisi says there’s still plenty of hard work to be done.

“Obviously we had a late start to the pre-season and we still want to get some really hard training in over the next few weeks, so that come round one we’ll have the same volume of training in us as we did last year,” he said.

“We wanted to go out there and win against Carlton on Saturday night, but that wasn’t the case, so now we move on.

“We’ve still got some great opposition this week against Sydney who looked pretty good last week.”

Port Adelaide’s training sessions this week are expected to include plenty of high intensity skills drills following what coach Mark Williams described as a “bizarre” display of handball overuse on Saturday night.

Cassisi said while it was only the first game of the year, it was important to iron out problems before the season proper.

“We definitely know that we overcooked the ball and had too many handballs and that’s definitely not the way we want to play,” he said.

“We over-used the ball and made a few skill errors, which is disappointing because we really try and pride ourselves on our skills.

“In the first game you tend to get out there and feel the added pressure, which you haven’t been used to, and you start to look to handball and get rid of the footy as soon as you can, when you probably don’t have to.

“But the young guys would have learned from that and the beauty is that we still have three or four weeks to get it right.”

The Power will tackle the Swans at ANZ Stadium on Saturday and are likely to welcome back a couple of the club’s more senior players.

A number of experienced players, including Chad and Kane Cornes and Peter and Shaun Burgoyne, were rested last week, but Cassisi said it was important for each and every player to get some game time before round one.

“Obviously being out of the NAB Cup means we’ll be able to play some more players. We’re not limited in the interchange, so it really allows us to monitor everyone’s game time,” he said.

“It also allows everyone to get good some touch and hopefully we’ll get some senior guys back into the team to get ready for round one.

“You want to get used to playing with the guys who will be in the side come round one and hopefully by the last game of the NAB challenge, we’ll be ready to go.”

Cassisi was one of Port Adelaide’s best players in the narrow loss to Carlton and he said there were plenty of positives to come out of the game.

“We got off to a good start and played pretty well in patches,” Cassisi said.

“The form of some of the young guys was a positive. I thought Matt Thomas was great in his role, Fabian Deluca got his hand to the ball a lot of times and Adam Cockshell was really good up forward in the second half.

“So there were a lot of positives and the young guys should feel pretty good about how they went.”