Melbourne Storm Craig Bellamy | Bellamy not confident of righting sinking Storm ship

“I come in here saying the same thing every week … we had some good efforts out there tonight, but there’s some stuff that you’re not going to get away with at this level and you’ll pay a price for that,” he said.

“And that’s what we’ve done.”

The Storm lost five-straight matches in 2012 between rounds 16-21 (including a bye) but didn’t lose another match on their way to the premiership.

Bellamy said poor defensive efforts after ball-handling errors needed to be fixed.

“That first half took a lot of petrol out of us, and if you’re going to make errors, you’ve got to be able to defend them,” he said.

“At the moment, we’ll do that 80 per cent of the time, but then the other 20 we won’t.

“We’ve lost four in a row now. I thought the first two losses we were really poor, but I thought we made some real steps last week and I thought we had some good parts of the game tonight, but if you keep making errors and you don’t back up with defence, well you’re going to lose the game.”

Storm skipper Jesse Bromwich said his side needed to return to playing their “own style of footy”.

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“It’s frustrating for the whole team – we’re not playing the Melbourne Storm style of footy,” he said.

“There’s a lot of ill-discipline and we’re working too hard in areas we shouldn’t be because those things are happening.

“We need to go back to that Melbourne Storm-style of footy – high discipline, high completions, good kicking games, do the hard stuff that other teams don’t do.”

The Storm will travel to Auckland to take on the Warriors next week, before hosting the Titans. Their run home then includes the Panthers, Broncos, Roosters and Eels.

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