MELBOURNE is remaining optimistic following its 38-point loss to Collingwood on King’s Birthday, with senior coach Simon Goodwin finding the positives within the results. 

The Demons suffered their fourth loss over five weeks, but with the bye ahead, Goodwin looks at the main objectives for improvement over the break. 

"There were things in our game that were a lot better but there were things that we need to work on," Goodwin said.  

“Collingwood's pressure was outstanding, and we didn't deal with their pressure very well. It made our execution look pretty average at times and we coughed up the ball way too much. 

"There were things in our game that we took a big step forward, but you sit here with a loss like that and it is hard to say because it's frustrating and I know our supporters want to win.  

"We're optimistic that we're just going through a little patch at the moment that we need to work through and we'll come out the other side.  

"Most teams go through this, we're still very optimistic about what's possible as we move forward through this. We are optimistic, but we are incredibly disappointed and I know our supporters would be." 

From the opening bounce, the Dees dominated contested possessions and hitouts, but were unable to convert in front of goals, only registering two goals from eight scoring shots.   

Vice-Captain Jack Viney expressed his disappointment following the match, and the lack of conversion from his side forward of centre.  

“That was kind of one of the reasons that we thought we didn’t get the result tonight,” Viney said.  

“We created some turnover opportunities, but we just weren’t able to score off the back of them and they were able to do that quite efficiently.   

“It does get frustrating but that’s part of football and we’ve just got to continue to stay at it and hopefully our game starts to turn but unfortunately that just didn’t happen tonight.  

“There were some changes during the week that we were looking to implement tonight to improve the contest and certain aspects of our game and I thought there were some positive KPIs coming out of those areas we looked to addressed. 

“Unfortunately, we just didn’t get the desired result, we do feel like thought that there were positive steps forward and we’ll continue to hone in on those.  
 
“We’ll go away these next five days, regroup and come back fresh and ready to take on North Melbourne.” 

Melbourne now have an eleven-day break before they take on North Melbourne on Saturday 22 June at the MCG.