MELBOURNE coach Dean Bailey says today’s 76-point defeat at the hands of Adelaide was a “step back” for his club after the round seven win over Fremantle.

Bailey kept the players in an unusually long team meeting after the match to emphasise the “two or three things that really let us down” – and it will be back to the training track for the Demons to work on their skills and decision-making.

“For me, it always gets back to the ability to execute a skill,” Bailey said after the match.

“Today, I reckon we took a step back. We probably fell back into a pattern we had before the Fremantle game.

“Our skills today and decision-making were really poor at times. We didn’t move the ball as well as we would have liked.

“And against the Crows here, they really make you pay.”

Bailey said the Demons were “playing in patches”, which was clearly not good enough at AFL level.

“I thought we started OK … (but then) they kicked two goals in the last minute of the first quarter which was disappointing. The second quarter, they got away from us, and from then on with the mistakes we made, they really hurt us.

“I was expecting us to use the ball better today, but we went back into our shells a little bit.

“There are signs in there, small snippets of the game where you can say we actually played reasonably well, but you can’t do that against a good club.

“You’ve got to play well and be competitive for longer than what we have been, and when we’re not competitive and not using the ball well teams are unfortunately scoring heavily against us.”

Bailey praised the efforts of Clint Bartram, who tagged Andrew McLeod and held him to just 12 touches, and also saw further good signs from Austin Wonaeamirri and Cale Morton, who kicked three goals and set up a couple more.

“He’s a work in progress (Morton), but he’s doing some things that would suggest he’s a good decision-maker and he’s going to be a very good player for us.

“I though Bartram’s job on McLeod and (James) McDonald’s job on (Tyson) Edwards, they stuck to their guns pretty well and they probably broke even or might have just pinched the match-up.

“We were happy with those two, but not enough done by everyone else, and the game’s about 22 contributors.”