FED UP with his team's poor performances, Melbourne coach Paul Roos says fans "deserve better" than what his players served up in an appalling 23-point loss to Carlton at the MCG on Sunday.

The Demons were listless in the first half, as the Blues opened up a 47-point lead at the major break.

Melbourne responded after the main break to cut the margin to 17 points in the final term, but it was all too little too late in front of a crowd of 33,962.

"Melbourne people deserve better when they come to the MCG and watch us play," a downcast Roos said after the match.

The slow start against the Blues came only a week after the Demons conceded the first 12 goals of the match against the Western Bulldogs in round 20.

Roos said he was sick and tired of watching his team capitulate like it has done in the past few weeks.

"Today's game is a sample of our season," Roos said.

"There's a serious problem, that we can't as a footy team play four quarters.

"It's something that we need to address one way or the other."

The lack of response after a 98-point loss to the Bulldogs last weekend was particularly discouraging, according to Roos.

"It's unbelievably disappointing. It's incredibly disappointing," Roos said.

Roos said the loss to the Blues gave his side a fair assessment of where it sits in the AFL spectrum.

"What it shows is what we've said for most of the year - we haven't been able to arrest the bad patches of play," he said.

"Our best is very good and our worst is still as bad as what it was.

"We've got to identify why we keep getting big drop-offs and that's the biggest challenge we face in the next two weeks and moving forward over the next 12 months."

Melbourne laid just two tackles in the first 20 minutes of the game (finishing with five for the first quarter), which Roos put down to his team's lack of fight and effort.

But he refused to blame the loss on the events of the past, adamant that would not be a focus of his coaching panel in the team's review.

"I don't really care … to be honest," Roos said in response to a question about whether the players were still haunted by past losses.

"It's about performance. We've got to improve our performance as a footy club.

"Whilst I was sympathetic to the footy club and where it's been, the coaching group's been here long enough to not worry about what happened in the past.

"It's more about where we want to go and the direction we want to take the football club."

With a trip to face ladder-leader Fremantle next week, ordinarily the match committee would be eager to make changes to the team.

But Roos said the club was not in any position to do so, with just nine Melbourne-listed players running out for VFL affiliate Casey on Sunday because of a lengthy injury list.

"You're really limited in who you can pick at this time of year, so it's going to be hard to make too many changes," Roos said.

Midfielder Heritier Lumumba is almost certain to not take his place in the team against the Dockers at Domain Stadium next Sunday after being substituted out of the game in the second quarter with an injury to his right ankle.

Chris Dawes and Colin Garland are also nursing injuries with the Demons to make a call on the pair later in the week.