Port Adelaide champion Kane Cornes says his relationship with champion teammate and former coach Matthew Primus has “never been the same” since the latter accused him of “leaking information to the media” during the 2012 AFL season.

Cornes played under Primus as captain at the Power for the first five years of his career, a period in which the club won its first and only premiership since joining the AFL — albeit doing so without Primus, who played just one game in 2004 due to injury.

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Primus retired from footy at the end of the 2005 season, after which he joined the club’s coaching ranks under Mark Williams.

When Williams stepped down after Round 15 of 2010, Primus took over as caretaker coach and eventually succeeded Williams in the full-time role the next year.

But his success as a caretaker — when he won five out of seven games to finish 2010 — didn’t carry over into the following two years, overseeing just eight wins from 40 games before being sacked in 2012.

Asked during Caro’s Conference on Tuesday night’s episode of The Agenda Setters about a bad day he’d had during his career, Cornes recalled his time with Primus.

“We had more than a bad day in an era at Port Adelaide which was a disaster,” he said.

“(Round 19) 2012 was Matthew Primus’s last game, we played the Giants when they were full of 18-year-olds.

“The vision kept going to Matthew Primus in the box. He left the box and was waiting for us in the changerooms.

“And it was the roughest review I’ve ever had. He essentially put his hand up and said, ‘I’m done, you guys have’ — and he used some expletives — ‘screwed me over’.”

Cornes said he felt personally attacked when Primus started throwing out some extraordinary accusations.

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“He accused the players of leaking information to the media, and I had the feeling he was directing those comments at me, which I took really personally, I was quite offended by that. But you can understand the pressure that he was under,” he said.

“By the time we landed in Adelaide, Matthew Primus had been sacked and Garry Hocking came in, and he sent us for the most brutal beach recovery you’ve ever seen the following week where players almost had hypothermia in the middle of winter.

“That was the most depressed I’ve ever been in my time at Port Adelaide.”

The 300-game Power champion said he and Primus have since broken bread, but have never really rekindled any friendship they did have.

“We’ve spoken; the relationship’s never been the same,” Cornes said.

“We weren’t that tight anyway, but I’ve got respect now for the situation he was put in, and how hard it would have been for him.”