Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley is supremely confident suspended defender Dan Houston will continue his AFL career at the South Australian club.
Houston has copped a season-ending five-game suspension for a bump that knocked out Adelaide's Izak Rankine in last Saturday night's clash of the SA rivals.
Houston's ban rules him out of Port's looming finals campaign and comes amid interest from rival clubs in Melbourne in luring the All Australian halfback.
"He has got a three-year contract with our footy club, loves our footy club," Hinkley told reporters on Friday.
"I'm really comfortable that Dan will play more games for Port."
Port lost its challenge to the length of Houston's ban at the AFL appeals board on Thursday night.
"It's clearly disappointing to lose a player of Dan's ability but we understand everything that has gone on," Hinkley said.
"The club did everything they could to support Dan through that and try and lessen the amount of time that he was out.
"We take the umpire's (tribunal) decision and we have to move on.
"The action that he took ... he got it wrong. He now pays the price for that.
"We support him, he's a very, very fair player, a very good player, and a great person."
Hinkley said the Houston incident evidenced just how hard it was for players to make instant on-field decisions.
"It's a really hard game to play, it is an instinctive game," he said.
"Mistakes will continue to happen in this game as much as we don't want them to happen, but they do happen.
"We do our absolute best, our players are educated really well on it, and to be fair, they've got enough education themselves.
"But it still goes to show that instinct in this game, a combative game, can make it really hard to make a split-second decision.
"We don't understand how tight a decision-making moment that they get to make those decisions."
Hinkley will turn to Ryan Burton and Josh Sinn to replace Houston in his rebounding halfback role.
"We're very lucky with our halfbacks that we've got a number of players who are good players (in that position)," he said.
"If you just go like-for-like, Dan Houston's probably going to be a two-time all Australian by the end of the year so it's going to be hard to replace that.
"But I always say you don't lose the whole player, you do get to replace them.
"We've got Ryan Burton who is a very good player, Josh Sinn is very good player - they come in and play.
"They might not quite be Dan Houston just yet but we're hoping that they can take a big slice of that."
