BIG Man Jack Fitzpatrick says the Demons can’t be satisfied with honourable defeats, such as their 19-point loss to the Brisbane Lions at TIO Stadium on Saturday night.

Fitzpatrick, who kicked a career-best four goals against the Lions, said Melbourne had improved significantly in recent weeks, but still couldn’t be happy with reasonable performances.  

“[We are playing much better than] compared to the start of the season, [when] we were getting blown out of the water a bit. We acknowledge that losses like this we were in the game a bit more, but at the same time we don’t want to settle for these losses,” he told melbournefc.com.au.

“You can get complacent and say ‘oh well, we got near five goals and that’s not a bad effort’. The fact of the matter is that we’re here to win games of AFL footy and we didn’t do it.

“I thought everyone had a crack all night, but going forward, we just need to work on our use of the ball and not make so many basic skill errors and turnovers.

“We’re definitely improving in the last four or five weeks – you can definitely see that, but at the same time we don’t want to get complacent with where we’ve been going.”

Fitzpatrick said the Demons were ruing the fact that it lost the game in the second term, when the Lions kicked five goals to one. 

“We thought we took it up to them all night. We had a red hot crack, but we were a bit sloppy with the ball, particularly in that second quarter,” he said.

“There was just a couple of crucial turnovers, as Craigy (coach Neil Craig) said, which turned the momentum of the game … it was fairly close and one or two [turnovers] in a row hurts you a bit.”

Fitzpatrick, who played his first match for premiership points in Darwin, said it was a great experience.

“She was pretty warm and very hot, but it was not as humid as it was in the pre-season, so from that aspect it was good,” he said.

“But it was a bit testing in the second half when we made our sub and Garlo (Colin Garland) got injured and we were down a rotation on the bench.

“The boys fought pretty hard and it was just unfortunate that we made some some basic errors that cost you.”