St Kilda captain Jarryn Geary has said his team needs to get back to playing ‘Saints footy’ if they wish to achieve more consistent, on-field performances.

The game style, based on a high-pressure contest game, was missing in St Kilda’s Good Friday loss to North Melbourne.

“We didn’t execute it [Saints footy] because we like to base our game on the contest and if you lose [the contest] by 31, it’s not Saints footy,” Geary told media at RSEA Park on Monday.

“We’ve got to get back to playing a contested, put-your-body-on-the-line type of football.

“The key message is that we’re really disappointed with the way we performed, but now it’s about what we’re going to do about it. We’re one-and-one, it’s round two and there’s a lot of water to go under the bridge.

“You can’t dwell on it otherwise you’ll get consumed by the game, and this one was a brutal one. We had some positive performances the week before, but were inconsistent again on Friday, which has been a bit of an issue for us for a while.

“We’ve spoken about consistency for a number of years now, it’s our biggest challenge, and you can’t do anything else but train it, try and improve. That’s my message to the playing group, that’s the coaches message – do something about it.”

After an impromptu all-team meeting on Saturday morning to close the chapter on the disappointing 52-point loss, Geary said the group will now focus their energy on this weekend’s home game against the Crows.

“You’ve got to move on so quickly. We performed relatively positively against the Lions the week before, but on the weekend we performed poorly, so you’ve got to look at the way you’re preparing and how you can emulate some of those positive performances more often,” Geary said.

“All AFL teams are good; it’s an even competition. It doesn’t matter who you play, you just have to rock up every week with an appetite to compete and we’ve got to do that this week and get after our contests.”

The skipper said he understood the frustration of passionate Saints fans given their performance, but he hoped he’d still see them at Etihad Stadium on Saturday when the team get a chance to redeem themselves.

“You let your fans down when you perform that way. They expect better from us and they deserve better.

"I wouldn’t want to rock up to a game and see the way we performed for our fans either. You can understand the disappointment, but all I can say is they’ve stuck with us for a long time and we’d encourage them to keep sticking by us.

“Hopefully going forward we can give them more things to smile about and fewer things to get angry at.”