RICHMOND coach Damien Hardwick has refused to blame a trip to the top end of Australia as the reason his side suffered a shock loss to Port Adelaide.

The Tigers went down by 15 points after upsetting Essendon just seven days earlier.

It was their first home game in the warm, humid conditions of Darwin but Hardwick said that had nothing to do with his team's poor performance.

"You can't use where we play as an excuse for a poor effort. At the end of the day we play at a footy ground that has got four sticks at either end and the ball is round so nothing much changes," Hardwick said.

"I thought we fumbled all night. I thought they (Port Adelaide) were a lot cleaner with their disposal, their efficiency by hand and foot seemed a lot better than ours and it was uncharacteristic of our guys.

"It was a real let down, we set ourselves up for the game, we thought we came here with good preparation and didn't play anywhere near well enough."

Hardwick said the Tigers struggled to cope with Port Adelaide's relentless defensive pressure and played right into their hands.

"We call it referring pressure. We were going around in circles at one stage. A lot of that was due to Port's pressure, they out tackled us by 27 or something like that," he said.

"Their pressure around the ball was a lot better than ours and forced us into handball chains which we didn't want. We tried to rectify that, mainly in the second quarter, I think we started to get on top of it but we just couldn't capitalise on some of our chances."

The Tigers will have time to regroup after the disappointing loss with the bye next week, but Hardwick said the week off came at a bad time.

"I wish we were playing next week to be perfectly honest. We've got to stew on this loss for two weeks. We'll give the guys a couple of days off then we'll hit the training track pretty hard," he said.

"It's probably the poorest we've played for quite some time. It is disappointing and the thing that really hurts us is we've got to wait two weeks to get back and have another crack at it."