SMILING "through gritted teeth", Adelaide coach Brenton Sanderson revealed he closely followed the Port Adelaide-Carlton clash on a mobile phone as the players prepared for their match against West Coast.
Though Adelaide went on to thrash the Eagles by 86 points, Sanderson said the club had been "deflated" by Carlton's last-gasp win over the Crows' cross-town rivals, which cost Adelaide a finals berth.
He said he considered not telling his team of Carlton's victory, but did and asked them for extra effort against West Coast.
"And then we obviously needed them to respond in the way they did,” he said.
"They did show a bit of character today, the way they were disappointed.
"I think some players probably took their frustrations out on the result, you know. You saw how ruthless they were today."
Sanderson laughed off suggestions that Port Adelaide might have conspired to keep his side out of the finals.
"There's so much romance in this game," Sanderson said.
"It came down to round 23 and we needed four things to go right for us this weekend.
"[After] the Geelong-Brisbane game … we drove to the game thinking we are right in this.
"Port Adelaide were 30-something points up at one stage and we thought the footy gods might be smiling on us, but that's the way this game sometimes heads.
"I'm smiling through gritted teeth because I'm really disappointed and I'm shattered for our fans because they have had to deal with a lot this year.
"We have had a lot of challenges, a lot of setbacks. Unfortunately, we miss out on a finals campaign, but we have just got to come back better next season."
Sanderson said a side who managed only 10 wins probably didn't deserve to play finals football.
"We weren't good enough. We mostly felt like from the first day of pre-season nothing went our way," he said
"We seemed to have bad luck around every turn. We had a lot of trauma injuries. We had broken legs, broken ankles, knee reconstructions, shoulder reconstructions.
"The silver lining was we exposed a lot of our kids to some AFL experience and they are going to be better for it.
"Even talking to a few of our senior players in the rooms just now they were so proud of our kids again tonight. They are getting better and better the more they play. We had seven players tonight – a third of our team – under 25 games experience."
Sanderson said watching the finals would hurt because of how close his team had come to playing in September.
But he said his team had given its all in the past month and he would not have done anything differently had he known how close Adelaide would come to playing in the finals.
