CROWS coach Neil Craig says his team will keep pushing to make finals despite slipping to ninth place on the ladder after a fifth-consecutive loss.

Adelaide continued its losing streak; its worst in nine years, on Sunday afternoon with a 12-point loss to bitter rivals Port Adelaide.

The Crows led by two points at half time but could not maintain the fight and as a result dropped out of the eight for the first time since round one.

“We had a lot to play for; a huge amount to play for and that’s disappointing for us as a club. We’ll need to go back and regroup and identify why that situation arose,” Craig said after the game.

“Our last five weeks, I think in four out of those five, we’ve been up at half time. I think our capacity, as a club to keep doing the things that we know create wins for us is certainly not at the level it needs to be to actually win.

“So, we’re going to keep pushing as hard as we possibly can and we’re going to be very demanding on all the players of our football club to get to the standard required for a full game of football.

“We see patches of it, we see halves of it, but we’re not seeing full games of it, which we need to do to stay in the fight for the eight.”

Craig believed Port Adelaide, who had nothing but pride to play for, displayed a greater intensity in what was a critical game for his side and conceded the Crows didn’t look like a finals team at the moment.

“Both sides played with an intensity, but I just thought Port were a bit better at the ball in close.

“It was a great contrast today in our second quarter. At quarter time, the only thing we spoke about was contested ball because it was way out of balance. In the second quarter, it was out of balance our way and we had 11 scoring shots.

“I thought, over the day, Port was better than us in that area of the ground in terms of strong tackling, ball in close and first on the loose ball, so we need to recognise it.”

Adelaide experimented with different faces in its forward line, including four-gamer Brad Moran, Andrew McLeod and Scott Stevens, but the result was still an 11-goal-game.

Craig said he would continue to experiment with different personnel and combinations up forward, but believed the second quarter proved the current set up could function effectively.

“As you know, we’re limited in resources at that area [forward] of the ground just at the moment with Brett Burton and Jason Porplyzia getting injured last week,” he said.

“But I’ll still go back to today [in the second quarter] when we won our fair share of contested ball and had 11 scoring shots with the same forward line you would’ve seen for most of the day.

“If we can have 11 scoring shots every quarter, we’ll be pretty happy."