COACH Paul Roos concedes his side has had an inconsistent start to the season, but he remains adamant the red and blue is right on track.

Roos said the fact that his list was still one of the youngest in the competition meant it was still very much in an educational and development phase.

“We’re still a little bit inconsistent; we’re a youngish team,” he said.

“We probably feel like [from] our three weeks [played so far] that Essendon was a down week; we had a good game against the Giants; a slow start against the Kangas and came home really, really well, so we definitely see the improvement, but the competition has improved.

“I think we’ve got to try and iron out that consistency, but inconsistency comes often with young players going in and out – they get tired at different times, need breaks and go out of form. Overall, we just want to try and improve every single week – that’s one of our goals. We didn’t improve [between] week one to two, but we did week two to three, and we’ll try and do that again this week.”

Roos said he was pleased with his side’s intensity and effort in last round’s five-point loss to North Melbourne at Blundstone Arena – even when it was 42 points down in the first term.

“It was interesting – we even felt in the [coaches’] box, in the first quarter that we seemed to be around the footy and we seemed to be doing pretty well,” he said.

“But again, when we looked at [it], there was a free kick that Maxy [Gawn] gave away, a 50-metre penalty, another free kick to someone else and another 50-metre penalty.

“The effort was genuinely there for most of the day and that’s what we’ve got to try and deliver, [but] we don’t have a big margin for error, so we’ve got to come with our A-game every single week.”

Roos said he was still intent on playing a finals-style game – regardless of how many goals were kicked in a match.

“I never go into a game thinking we’re going to kick ‘X’ amount of goals than what the opposition is going to kick,” he said.

“What you try to do as coach is set up a game-style you believe is going to stand in finals at the MCG. Goals are outcome-based – they’re either based on turnovers, free kicks, good passages of play etc. So I don’t really focus on the scoreboard. I just try to focus on how we prepare our team, educating them and trying to play a game-style that we think will eventually get us back out here [at the MCG] late in September.

“Turnovers are a big thing in footy. If you turn the ball over in dangerous parts of the ground, the team will really punish you. We’re a young team that’s trying to set a certain game-style – we won’t change a lot of stuff we do for Collingwood, North Melbourne, Essendon and the Giants. You look at them and you respect all of the opposition teams, but I think again for us, it’s working out how we want to play and continuing to do what we did last weekend and hopefully do it better.”