Despite equalling the club record by winning their 10th game in succession and keeping Melbourne goalless after half time, Lyon was far from satisfied with the Saints’ victory.
While he walked away pleased with the effort, Lyon said St Kilda had more work to do on their defence and execution.
He praised leaders Lenny Hayes (35 possessions) and Nick Riewoldt (four goals), but said the Saints were a bit ‘cute’ with their first-half ball use, when they led the Demons by just eight points.
“We think our best is yet to come,” Lyon said.
“We’re never completely satisfied, (there’s) always lots of things to work on. It certainly wasn’t a faultless performance.
“We didn’t take our opportunities. I thought we over-used the handball so we had a focus on kicking the ball and spreading the ball more in the second half and I thought we did that effectively.”
Despite not being totally satisfied with the skills of his team, Lyon said the effort barometer was how he would judge the performance and with 16 more inside 50s, 15 more contested possessions and 62 tackles, he was relatively happy.
“If we bring effort we’re confident we’ll win the game,” he said.
“We can lose having gone forward. We understand if we lose a game, if we bring the effort and weren’t quite good enough, we can cope with that, then we just analyse what we can fix.
“If you don’t get effort well then you can worry.
“It’s hard to get this message across and I’m not sure many people believe it, but they’re (Melbourne) quite a good football team.
“They can certainly run and spread. Their weakness is their younger group can get lost in transition, so the real focus was ‘let’s compete’ because if you don’t you’ll get embarrassed very quickly.
“We don’t see any easy games, no-one really believes that, (but) we have a lot of respect for Melbourne.
“We walk away with a valuable four points and a hard earned win. Maybe from the outside people think that’s expected but I know from the coach’s box I never felt that.”
Lyon said Stephen Milne’s knee injury, which forced him out of Saturday night’s game, would be assessed during the week and will decide his availability for the round 11 clash with North Melbourne.
