GEELONG'S treatment of the Port Adelaide Football Club has been condemned by rival clubs, with West Coast chief Trevor Nisbett declaring the Cats deserved to be the target of a full-scale retribution for their blatant pursuit of Travis Boak.

''I don't care whether a club is in the firing line for finals or not,'' said Nisbett, ''it's out of the rugby league handbook and I just hope we're not going to see the game stoop to these levels.

''I know if it happened to our club we wouldn't be sitting down and accepting it. We'd be going in and making big offers to all their players. If anyone tried to poach one of our players during the season when he was contracted we'd go back and try to poach as many of theirs as possible.''

Sydney boss Andrew Ireland told The Age that the excuse that the introduction of free agency had changed the landscape was irrelevant in the case of Boak, the reigning Port club champion.