MELBOURNE midfielder James Harmes says his side can turn their poor start to 2019 around with some minor tweaks in the coming weeks.

While the Demons have dropped the opening three games of the season and copped plenty of scrutiny for their performances, Harmes has no doubt some good footy is not far away.

“It’s not the ideal start to the year but we’re pretty confident that we’ve got the right people in place and we can get the job done,” Harmes said on the club’s Inside Melbourne podcast.

“We’ll move on, review it … just try to stay positive and get back to work and hopefully this week can get on the board.”

A major problem for the Demons, particularly in the past two weeks, has been their defensive breakdowns resulting in some big opposition scores.

Melbourne has conceded 20 goals to both the Cats and Bombers in consecutive games, causing some issues heading into Round 4.

“We’re just not functioning as a team defensively at the moment,” Harmes said.

“We’re pretty one-on-one and it’s hard for the backs to take aggressive position if the mids aren’t getting back to support and if the forwards aren’t doing their job.

“Everyone needs to work together in defence – it’s not a one-on-one style that we play.”

But Harmes is confident the boys can make that adjustment against Sydney this week and turn the defensive game into a positive for the club.

“Once everyone starts buying and we start defending well we’ll start playing a lot better football,” he said.

“It’s probably our biggest weakness at the moment but if we can turn it into our biggest strength like we did at the end of last year we’ll be pretty hard to stop.”

Listen to the full podcast below:

In episode thirty four of Inside Melbourne, Lily Mithen gives the team a summary of the AFLW best and fairest (1:00), Jack Viney discusses our poor start to the season (3:00) and we look ahead to our first interstate trip to Sydney (13:30). We talk about Harmsey's toughest moment of his career (27:00) and much more questions from the outer.