ROSS Lyon's demeanour was measured after his side's capitulation yesterday, but the St Kilda coach's words cut deep. "My job is to set us in a direction with a group of players that aren't mentally soft and aren't physically soft," Lyon said. "We have a few that are, and opposition clubs know that.

"We'll self-assess and the players will self-assess. If we're honest, we're not hard enough, we're not tough enough, consistently enough. I can show you games and quarters, but league footy's about a week-in, week-out battle."

Lyon said too much had been left to club leaders Lenny Hayes, Luke Ball and especially veteran Robert Harvey. "Leadership's everyone's responsibility. It's too hard against good teams in tough conditions to leave too much to too few.

"We're not hard and tough enough, often enough, across the board. Which is my responsibility to fix, so I've got an opportunity, I've got 13 weeks to fix it. If I can't do it, then we'll reassess."

Lyon said his poorly performed players would be weeded out, but denied wholesale changes would be made. "Our season's alive in a sense. There's enough teams on our day we can beat if we improve our consistency to sneak into the bottom end of the eight," he said.

"We're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We're four-five; we've had some good performances and inconsistent performances. We have to analyse why, but it starts with competing. We're not competing hard enough for long enough. It's easy to kick eight when the game's over. You've got to do it when the heat's on."

Lions coach Leigh Matthews was somewhat deflated after watching a 75-point lead whittled to 46, struggling to explain the fade-out.

"I don't know the answer to that; if we knew the answer to that, we'd try to solve it pronto," Matthews said. "The last 10 minutes we saw was quite poor, but the first 100 minutes was exceptionally good."

Matthews said he was "always conscious of percentage because it's an important issue … We've had a number of games now where we've certainly blown a much bigger margin by having a very poor last 10 minutes".