Richmond coach Damien Hardwick knows all too well the emotional and physical pain that comes from playing in the fiercely contested South Australian showdowns between Port Adelaide and Adelaide.
As a Power player from 2002-04, Hardwick played in several memorable showdowns against the Crows before retiring as a player after Port's historic first AFL premiership success in 2004.
And now he is hoping that his old club has done his new club a favour by softening up the Crows for their trip to the MCG to play Richmond this Sunday on what is expected to be a cold and wet afternoon in Melbourne.
The Crows' surprise loss to Port in last week's showdown - which handed caretaker Power coach Matthew Primus his first win as coach following the end of the long Mark Williams' era - has bought Adelaide's growing momentum to a shuddering halt.
After a disastrous start to the season, the Crows had won their past four matches before the loss to Port which now leaves Neil Craig's team two games and percentage adrift of the top eight and on course to miss the finals for the first time since 2004 - the year Craig first took over mid-season from the dumped Gary Ayres.
Certainly Hardwick is hoping that result has effectively knocked the stuffing out of the Crows' season knowing that Richmond needs all the mental edge it can get against Adelaide having beaten the Crows just once in their past 14 meetings - the infamous Terry Wallace 'basketball crap' game in 2006.
"We hope so," he said on Thursday when asked if the Crows might be on a mental and physical let-down after last week's costly loss to their bitter rivals.
"It was a tough game last week, as all the showdowns are, and it is always an emotional build-up to those games so any advantage we can get we will take."
Richmond, which lost its first nine games of the season, had been on a good run of form as well after winning five of six games between Rounds 10 and 15 before suffering heavy defeats in its past two matches against North Melbourne and Collingwood.
But Hardwick says his team will field a much stronger line-up this weekend against the Crows than during last week's 82-point mauling at the hands of the league leaders with key defenders Will Thursfield and Kelvin Moore to return from injury while experienced midfielders Daniel Jackson and Matt White will return from suspension and injury respectively.
And while the Tigers' finals hopes have long since gone, Hardwick would be disappointed if his team did not have plenty of motivation on Sunday against a team whose own finals hopes are hanging by a thread.
"We think it will be disappointing if we went back into our shells and went back into how we played at the start of the year," Hardwick said.
"We have had our form ladder from round nine onwards and I think we are even on the ledger at the moment (the Tigers have actually won five of their past eight games since then) so we want to keep our heads above water on that score and that has been a real driving force of ours."
"So it's going to be a real character builder for our guys to see how they finish off the year."