IN THE second half of Sunday's match at the MCG, Melbourne's kick-to-handball ratio rose to its highest level for a half this year. But the players did not abandon the game plan of their new coach — on the contrary, they finally adhered to it, Dean Bailey said.

"How they played in the second half is exactly how they have been training and how we have wanted them to play," Bailey said.

"Nothing has changed, it was just the speed of the ball was good, which is what we have been talking about all pre-season.

"Our problem has been we have been turning the ball over in the middle of the ground and the turnovers have really cost us. And at the weekend, we worked a lot harder than before and we reduced the turnovers."

Melbourne under Neale Daniher was a long-kicking, corridor side that appeared to morph under Bailey into a side preferring handballs and run and carry. The difficulty with this game for that team has been having the players with the leg speed to carry it and the hand skills to deliver it. They were dissolving in confusion and indecision, paralysed by fear of being bold and second-guessing their natural inclination.

In a turn on the darkest moment being before the dawn, two interesting things occurred. The first came the week before Sunday's win.

In the round-six loss to the Brisbane Lions, Melbourne had its lowest ratio of kicks-to-handballs for the year — basically, one-to-one. But incredibly, the Demons had more disposals in their defensive 50 of any side ever recorded by Champion Data. And with the number of disposals in games now being at a higher level than ever, it is safe to say that no side in the history of the AFL has played with the ball in their defensive 50 more than the Demons did at the Gabba. They fiddled with it, passed it back, were hesitant and overly cautious.

This game preceded a match against Fremantle that was the hardest marketing sell in football and had players ringing members directly asking them to come. (Even, amusingly, Nathan Carroll cheekily cold-calling Mark Harvey and asking why he had not become a member.)

In the first half, Melbourne had a higher kick-handball ratio than nearly every other match this year, but it was still much lower than the second half, when it had more than 1½ kicks for every handball. So the Demons were seeking to kick more and to attack, they were just doing it badly.

Bailey said the players were told at this bleak moment — 50 points down against the notoriously flaky Fremantle — that enough was enough, play to win, you can still win. But they were not told to abandon what they had been told about how he wanted them to play.

"What happened in the second half is we didn't have to handball as often because the handball got us out of trouble and into the open to kick, whereas in the first half, our handball kept us in trouble or under pressure — one handball led to another, which put us under pressure, led to another to another and to a turnover," he said.

"In the second half, our first handball to our second handball got us out of traffic to a guy who could kick the ball."

Likewise, the appearance that in Melbourne's impressive second half, it was once again kicking the ball longer.

"I think (going longer) is the end result of getting the ball to a guy who can run and kick the ball. It is really a simple as that. The first half, a lot of the errors we made we were slowing the speed of the ball down," Bailey said.

"How we played the second half was more how we trained. We have shown glimpses of that but have not put it together for a long period of time. I have not changed anything."