MELBOURNE young-gun Matthew Bate believes his team learned plenty from playing the Sydney Swans at Manuka Oval on Sunday.

Bate believes the Demons can aspire to play like the Swans.

"Sydney is a great side; they've got big finals contender written all over them and they've got heaps of experience and even their second-tier players are really good. They play for each other and you can tell they've played with each other for a long time.

"They also work for each other. They're a team we can gain some really good experience playing against and trying to emulate them.

"To get claw our way back within 11 points was a good effort, after it looked like it was going to get blown out of our control in the first quarter, so it showed good character from the boys to fightback."

Although Bate said there were some positives from the match against the Swans, he added that the Demons needed to maintain their focus throughout the match.

"I think it's just a mindset thing. We've showed that we can be competitive against any of the top sides – Hawthorn, Collingwood and for two quarters we were really good against Sydney," Bate said.

"We need to be able to do that for the whole game and I don't know what that's due to, whether it's a young list or inexperienced players or we're not concentrating enough – it's hard to pin-point what it is, but we'll be doing our best to get that out of our game.

"We're not going to win games, until we play four quarters."

Bate, who was Melbourne's best player against the Swans with four goals, had mixed views on his own game. 

"I thought I did pretty well in the areas I've been trying to work on over the last few weeks, so in that case I was pleased with it," Bate said.

"We worked well in the forward line together, but there were not a lot of opportunities. I was reasonably happy with my game, although there were some missed opportunities.