MELBOURNE coach Dean Bailey has challenged his players to cast off the indecisive play that has plagued them in recent weeks and take the game up to St Kilda on Saturday.

An emphatic 96-point win over Adelaide in round seven was sandwiched between desperately disappointing losses to West Coast and North Melbourne that saw the team and its coach subjected to intense media scrutiny.

The wildly fluctuating efforts have made the Demons difficult to accurately assess this season and have provided Bailey with a rollercoaster ride he has tired of.

But despite Melbourne's struggles with consistency, the simple fact remains, the team can move back inside the top eight with a win against the Saints and Bailey dared his players to seize that opportunity when he spoke to the media on Friday.

"We've got to be bold and we've got to be brave with our ball movement," Bailey said after the team's final training session at Gosch's Paddock.

"We've been practicing that way over the last two or three weeks to try and generate the ball movement we want.

"We've got a great challenge ahead of us on Saturday, but we need to take the game on. Sitting back and not taking the game on is not a brave or a bold way to play the game.  

"The clubs have got a lot to fight for this week. The effort that's going to be needed from us has got to be better than what we've shown in this rollercoaster ride at the moment."

Bailey's desire for greater consistency wasn't helped at the selection table, where he made five changes to the team that lost to North Melbourne by 41 points after leading by four goals at quarter-time.

Four of those changes were forced upon the coach with Austin Wonaeamirri (knee), Rohan Bail (knee), Colin Garland (ankle) and Lynden Dunn (suspension) all unavailable while Jamie Bennell was dropped.

Joel Macdonald, Jared Rivers, Matthew Bate, Jordie McKenzie and Michael Evans, who will make his AFL debut, come into the team. 

St Kilda's own struggles with fitness and form- the Saints go into the match sitting in 15th place with one win- provide little comfort to Bailey, who is wary of the talent still contained in the team that played off in last year's Grand Final.

"They're probably down a little bit on form, but they've still got some outstanding players with some great experience," he said.

"They've got enough players in there to suggest that they're going to be up again this week."

The talented, if youthful, players available to Bailey has led to a perception his team is under-performing this season, but the coach said the ability of his charges was not the key factor behind the Demons' recent mixed results. 
 
"Talent never comes out until you work hard enough," he said.

"We've been training well for the last couple of weeks, we've been doing a lot more tackling and we've been adding a lot more intensity to training to try and really spark them. It happened against Adelaide, but unfortunately it didn't happen last week.

"The only way we can really determine how well we're going is how we perform next week. In the game on Saturday, we'll be looking at how often we can tackle and how much pressure we can bring for the whole game."