MELBOURNE coach Paul Roos says the Demons' inability to consistently compete inside their forward 50 cost them against Essendon, but says it is a "collective" issue.
The Demons were awful in front of goal on Saturday in their nine-point loss to the Bombers, kicking 7.18 and falling nine points short despite 13 more inside 50s.
Chris Dawes went goalless, Jeremy Howe and Jesse Hogan kicked one goal each, and defender Tom McDonald booted one after a pair of missed shots in the last quarter.
But it was their lack of consistency to force a contest, combined with their inaccuracy that frustrated Roos the most.
"It's disappointing, just our inability to bring the ball to ground forward of centre," Roos said afterwards.
"There's the goalkicking that detracts from your 25 shots - if you kick half of them, you win the game
"Also, to take advantage of the other inside 50s you need your forwards to compete and bring the ball to ground, and that was one of the things we discussed with the players most of the game and post match.
"We weren't able to do that often enough.
"I think today was pretty simple in terms of us dissecting the game - when we did get a contest, we did well, and when we didn't, we either missed goals or the ball came out."
The move of McDonald to the forward line for the fourth quarter changed the dynamic of the game as Melbourne surged, and Roos didn't rule out doing it again.
Overall, he said the Demons' issues, which have come to light since their inspiring 24-point win over Geelong three weeks ago, couldn't be isolated to one player or line.
"I think it's a collective (issue) at the moment," Roos said.
"We're working really hard on a certain game style and it's really about the 22 at the moment.
"We're a really young team as well so just the synergy between the backs-mids, mids-forwards is not always great.
"It's not necessarily always [the forwards'] fault because some of the ball that comes in … I reckon a couple of our kicks went advantage side to the Essendon defenders.
"It's a real combination of a number of things we weren't able to get right today."
Roos said the Demons were "still playing better than we have been", despite losing their past two games.
In a bid to avoid another season fade out as they did last year when the Demons lost their last 10 games, he said they would work on keeping the players' spirits up as well as practicing their goal-kicking.
"Some weeks it appears to work well as it did against Geelong and then other weeks … it falls apart," he said.
"Really, it's just got to come back to practice."
"If you kick 7.18, it makes it really, really hard because you've got to keep the other team to a pretty low score.
"We did a lot of things right but against Geelong we kicked 18.5 and to kick 7.18 just makes it really difficult to win the game.
"When we played the way we wanted to play, we played some really good football, which we have done over the last month but it's keeping the players up when you have a bad result."
