PORT Adelaide's most experienced player Angus Monfries believes the club's – and his own – form is slowly building to where it needs to be.
The Power have dropped their past three games but their loss to Richmond last weekend at least bore some positives for coach Ken Hinkley.
They were able to trap the ball inside their forward half for long periods, which resulted in 10 more inside 50s than the Tigers.
Monfries will play his 200th game on Saturday against Melbourne and said the club's confidence in its skills was improving every training session.
The retirement of Kane Cornes saw Monfries take the mantle as Port's most capped player, ahead of Patrick Ryder (178) and Jay Schulz (175).
"We're playing some patchy footy at the moment and you can't really play a quarter or two quarters of good footy you've got to be consistent throughout the whole game," Monfries said.
"A lack of execution and confidence with our skill level at the moment is probably letting us down.
"The last couple of weeks at training we've been building it, we trained really well last Wednesday and then again yesterday … hopefully this weekend we can show it on game day."
Monfries too is hoping to keep building form after what he described as a slow start to the year.
The 28-year-old had just three possessions in the club's round-one loss to Fremantle and until recently hasn't been able to regularly hit the scoreboard.
He said the culmination of the Essendon supplements investigation might have slightly impacted the start of his 2015 campaign, as did hip surgery late last year.
"I started the year a little bit slowly but I think my form's slowly been building and it'd obviously be nice the last could of weeks to get a win and hopefully we can get a win this week," he said.
"I had a bit of a restricted pre-season because of [the surgery] but I feel like I'm slowly getting there and starting to build some good form."
Port's form slowly building, insists Monfries
Angus Monfries says Port is still on the right track