Port Adelaide coach Matthew Primus is confident he can counter any surprises thrown at him by Crows caretaker coach Mark Bickley.

Bickley has promised changes in his first AFL match as head coach on Sunday in the twilight grudge clash against Port.

"You would be silly to go in exactly the same," Bickley said, referring to Adelaide's crushing 103-point loss to St Kilda last start which prompted Neil Craig's resignation.

"So we'll do a few things differently, but you don't throw them all up in the air - you make some slight changes and some of them may work and some of them might not."

Primus said Port were prepared for any surprise moves by the Crows.

"We are pretty confident with what we are going to deal with," he said.

"And think we can match up on whatever midfield mix gets thrown at us and their talls or smalls, forward or back, we think we can handle."

Port enter the fixture in last spot and Primus admitted avoiding the wooden spoon was a motivating factor.

"We have spoke about that a fair bit over the last couple of weeks publicly and internally, we don't want to finish down the bottom of the ladder," Primus said.

"So we will look at this showdown as a chance for us to get a win.

"We have been competitive over the last month ... and done a power of work over the bye and really set ourselves to finish off the season on a good note, and that starts with this game.

"We're focussed pretty well on ourselves, we know what we need to do to get better and be consistent in games ... we can't control what our opposition are doing, we have just got to worry about ourselves and make sure that our own backyard is in order."

Primus said he was not treating the clash against their arch rivals as like a final for his club.

"We have got to treat this as a normal game," he said.

"Yeah, there is a bigger build-up in the town, no doubt about it ... but we have got to get away from building ourselves up for showdowns.

"It has come at an opportune time - we're on the bottom of the ladder and they have had a change of coach.

"But in the end it's going to be another game for us and we have got to prepare for this like we do any other week, which we have."

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