MELBOURNE coach Paul Roos has pledged to start applying some tough love to his players after the Demons' 93-point thumping from West Coast at the MCG on Sunday.
Although Roos acknowledged that the loss of key forwards Mitch Clark, Chris Dawes and Jesse Hogan has had a big impact on his side, he was not prepared to forgive the bad habits that were on display against the Eagles.
"We've got to teach some of the more basic things of footy, and we've got to do that a lot better," he said.
"If you get hold of the ball and you fumble it all the time, if you can't make tackles, they're the most basic things in footy. Today we were just really poor at it.
"Whether that's habits, but certainly it's been going for a long time, I suspect.
"How do you break the habits? You've got to keep training for it and training for it or you just pick different blokes."
Key forward Jack Fitzpatrick is among the players in the gun. Fitzpatrick was subbed out of the game in the third quarter after gathering just four possessions and failing to take a mark.
Jack Watts also had a shocker, with a dropped chest mark close to goal the low-point of his ordinary afternoon.
"It's round two, but I'm certainly putting a dossier together," Roos said.
"It's early in my tenure here, but certainly you're building up a profile on each of the players, you're seeing them under the heat, and you're seeing what they can and can't do.
"There's some non-negotiables in footy. That's just the reality of what the game is. If you can't do them, you can't play.
"Some of the stuff today … guys missing chest marks. I haven't seen that before, so it's an eye-opener for me. Some of the errors were just incredible.
"At some point you've to draw a line in the sand and say 'These are the guys we're going to pick'.
"If you want to do (the basics) in the seconds and develop, then you'll get picked again.
"But if you don't want to do them, then you just don't play, because you can't become a good team unless you have those real non-negotiables.
"We've got to be clear about what we stand for as a footy club and what we deem as acceptable and unacceptable."
One positive for Melbourne was the fact its midfielders managed to get their hands on the ball.
In fact, the Demons recorded six more disposals than West Coast, with Nathan Jones (34 touches) finishing as the leading ball-winner on the field.
But the Dees simply had no reliable tall targets to kick to inside forward 50.
"You can see the hesitation, even when we got out in space, there was just no one to kick it to," Roos said.
"I don't think players mean to chip it side to side all day. They're looking up and when Jimmy Toumpas is playing on Darren Glass, I'm not sure Jimmy is going to outmark Glassy too often with a bomb ball coming in.
"So certainly that's having a huge bearing on your ability to score. It probably doesn't have that big of an impact to do those basic things.
"I guess that's my job on Monday, to separate those two components: that we don't have a forward line … as opposed to the areas that every footy team has got to demand that you do."
It was left to little men Shannon Byrnes, Jimmy Toumpas and Jay Kennedy-Harris to boot Melbourne's entire tally of four goals.
As for whether there's anything he can do to change the situation while Clark, Dawes and Hogan remain on the sidelines, Roos said: "I was talking to Wayne Carey … I ran into him at Port Melbourne last week.
"I might have another chat to him this week."
