COACH Todd Viney says Melbourne's major focus for the rest of the season is  to keep working on the fundamentals of its game.

Viney, who is Melbourne’s interim coach for the rest of 2011, said he wanted his players to keeping honing their basic skills, as a platform for next year.

“Our structures and our stoppages were better. There’s no doubt that our transition needs to be worked on this week to make sure we maximise the hard work, by moving the ball efficiently and not turning it over,” he said.

“If you want to handball through the middle of the ground, you’re going to get yourself into trouble, so we’ve got to work that out and get a little bit more space and a little bit more width. And we’ve got to use the width of the ground to kick the ball a bit more, I reckon.

“I saw Hawthorn play Port Adelaide yesterday and even though Hawthorn was way in front, a couple of times they tried to use the handball too much in the middle of the ground. And Port still turned them over. I still think we’re using the ball by hand too much.”

Viney praised West Coast’s ability to bounce back from a miserable 2010 to a finals campaign this year. He said the Eagles were a good role model for the Demon to follow.

But he was pleased his team’s ability to hit back with a strong third quarter, after West Coast kicked 7.7 to 2.2 in the second term.

“I was pretty happy last week too. Last week was similar. It was a 70-point difference in the second quarter, so I thought three quarters last week was pretty good and three quarters today,” he said.

“Our contested possession was in the positive. Our scores from stoppages were around the mark. Previous to that, over the last three weeks, we had been really, really poor.

“West Coast was third in the competition from scoring from stoppages and we basically broke even in that area, so that’s something we’ve been working on. [We] made sure our structures around stoppages are better. I think today was a pretty even result in that area.”