MELBOURNE is churning out wins and continuing to arguably be the biggest threat to the North Melbourne juggernaut, but coach Mick Stinear is still searching for more improvement from his side. The latest win was a 14-point victory over Essendon, winning 5.6 (36) to 3.4 (22) at Ikon Park on Friday night.

Stinear said he would “definitely take the four points” but emphasised the game was a “bit scrappy” though he was pleased the team “did enough to win”.

“I think this time last year it was a very different scoreline, so we’ve improved which is good,” Stinear said. “But started well, a good deal of ferocity at the start of the game and I think that set the game up really. “But then it was a bit scrappy for large parts, we weren’t clean enough around the ball, I felt they outworked us for a large period of the game through the middle of the ground.

“We just couldn’t quite connect forward of centre, we couldn’t win many contests in our front half as we had been doing, so credit to Essendon, they were able to take that away from us. The team did enough to win, but probably a game we’ll learn a lot from and can definitely continue to improve.”

One of the major concerns for Stinear was the lack of scoring efficiency, only producing five goals from 40 inside 50s. Melbourne had plenty of looks, but the Dees’ coach conceded that the depth of entries and connection between midfield and forward was “that little bit off”.

“I think some of our entries were quite shallow,” Stinear said. “We really struggled to connect and get that flow outside the first quarter, so we weren’t getting that normal connection and our layering going into our forward half was just that little bit off.

“They were well set behind the ball, they had some good numbers and it just wasn’t connecting like it had been for us. I thought we could have been more direct, they had more of the footy than us, but we had more entries. Definitely needed to make the most of those with a big more connection and putting the ball to the advantage of our forwards.”

While Melbourne is considered potentially the biggest challenger to the rampaging Roos, fans will have to wait until the finals series for a potential clash. The reason being, due to each side not playing everyone in the regular season, the Dees and Roos do not face off over the 12-week campaign.

When asked if is frustrated Melbourne cannot get an early litmus test against North prior to finals, Stinear said while it would be nice, the Roos are not the only tough team in the league.

“I mean we’d love to keep working towards a competition where we play each other once, but for now we’ve got some good challenges, we’re off to Freo next week, we lost that game last year,” he said. “They’ve really started to step up, I thought they competed really well last night in tough conditions.

“I think moving forward it would be nice to play everyone and you get that experience, but for now we think we’ve got enough quality challenges ahead of us, and hopefully if we can continue to win, and give ourselves a chance to be playing and competing in finals. Games like tonight we’ve still got to work on our gamestyle and improve and put us in a position where we can compete and really push teams like North.”

While Stinear has been big on the team element, the Dees coach praised the work of defender Maeve Chaplin who also moved into the middle to use her strength around the coalface. Chaplin finished with 24 disposals, six marks, five tackles, 14 intercepts, two clearances, four inside 50s and nine rebound 50s in the victory.

“She’s doing such a good job behind the ball, she progressed into our senior leadership group, so off-field she’s having a big impact, on-field she’s playing her best footy. Intercepting, reading the game well, but hard to play against and then using her power and her kicking game to take us forward,” Stinear said.

“Then probably with Liv Purcell being out, it’s probably opened the door to use Maeve’s strength around the ball a bit more in recent strengths. We’ve been exploring that, and she’s been thriving in that role as well.”