AFL umpires from Victoria are cordially invited to Alberton Oval for dinner, a chat and a chance to get to know Port Adelaide's players.

Power coach Mark Williams put out the offer of hospitality to the game's officials after watching his side suffer from a lopsided free kick count in Saturday's pre-season cup encounter with league powerhouse Geelong.

The Cats muscled to an 18-point victory in a scrappy and zone-heavy encounter, helped at least partly by a first half free-kick ledger weighted heavily in their favour.

"The free-kick-count was 15-5 at half time and that absolutely wrecked us. They had shots on goals from free kicks and that really does hurt you. It also stops the momentum of the side, so we have to get better at that," Williams said.

"Some of them (the free kicks) were questionable, so you'd like to be able to talk to them.

"There are a lot of development umpires out there so they're going to make mistakes and you can't do much about that."

The answer, according to Williams, is to provide the umpires with much greater familiarity to his team, something he reasoned could be achieved by some more visits to the Power's Alberton base.

"It's really difficult to get the umpires out to training; we've tried," he said.

"We want to get some of the Victorian umpires over to Adelaide, so that they become aware of our players, know who they are and get some sort of relationship with them, because certainly we want to have even footy in that regard."

Williams' suggestion for open dialogue reflects the transparency Port are trying to embrace this season under a new club leadership division led by chief executive Mark Haysman, president Brett Duncanson and new skipper Domenic Cassisi.

With Williams, they are trying to build up the club in difficult economic times - reflected by the measly attendance of 8,341 at the Cats game - through a melding of Port's old time values and fresh ideas.

One of those was a members' information night this week when detailed presentations were provided by the coaching staff about the modern games.

At least some of the night was spent dissuading supporters from heckling players for kicking short and sideways to circumvent a zone defence rather than kicking it "down the guts" in the old fashioned way.

"We had some great feedback from our supporters on that," Williams said.

"They were rapt to be there, rapt to be involved and certainly felt a lot of warmth from the supporters that we're working hard and trying to get better."

Geelong, meanwhile, should have the likes of Matthew Scarlett, Cameron Ling and Joel Corey back in action next week in the cup semi-final.

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