MELBOURNE coach Dean Bailey believes his team got "toweled up" in the stoppages, which ultimately led to the Demons falling away to a 40-point loss at Manuka Oval on Sunday, after the 'home' side staged a third quarter fightback.

After trailing by 38 points early in the second term, Melbourne got to within 11 points in he third quarter. And although Bailey said some positives came out of that third term, he said those efforts needed to be backed up every quarter.

"You need to have that for the whole game. If we'd had that at the start of the game, then the game would've been close at the end of the first quarter. So it's nice to see, but you want to see it from the start and that's where we need it to be," Bailey said post-match.

"We spoke about starting well and we let ourselves down at the stoppages. The stoppages really hurt us today – and they made us pay.

"We got off to a really poor start, and we spoke about getting off to a good start in the first quarter. We gave away some free kicks that really cost us, and that was really disappointing to be so far behind early in the game."

Still, some of the work contributed by Melbourne's forwards pleased Bailey. 

"'Bater' [Matthew Bate] continues to work pretty hard, and he got rewarded today – a couple of really nice long goals and he's a long kick from outside 50, so he took his chances. We were pretty pleased with him," Bailey said.

"I thought Paul Johnson was pretty reasonable today as a target. 'Aussie' [Austin Wonaeamirri] didn't get a lot of the footy, but he ended up kicking three from pretty low stats, so forwards are going to have those games where you're not going to have a lot of the footy, but you've got to make the impact on the scoreboard.

"I thought [Brad] Miller still worked pretty hard as a forward target for us, so there's four or five blokes there that can go through there. We tried to stretch them, with an extra tall down there at stages, but we couldn't get the ball in there for long enough."

He also spoke of Lynden Dunn's fine performance on dual Brownlow Medallist Adam Goodes. Dunn held Goodes to 12 touches.

"His job on [Adam] Goodes was good, and I thought 'Dunny' actually got a little bit of the ball himself. He attacked off Adam, so I think that's a nice part of Lynden's game," Bailey said.

Defender Chris Johnson also played his best match under Bailey so far, with his efforts on dangerous Swans forward Ryan O'Keefe.

"'CJ' was good. I thought he kicked the ball pretty good through the middle of the ground, and he's showed some progression. He'll get some confidence from today's game," Bailey said.

"We need him to play well every week, and we need him to play well next week."