PAUL Roos says that the first half of the 2016 season has been an important learning curve for Melbourne’s young list.

Sitting at six wins and seven losses after 13 rounds, Roos said that he was pleased with Melbourne’s on-field progress this season given the team’s relative youth and inexperience.

“It’s always hard because I don’t tend to look at the draw,” he said.

“It’s more about the way you’re playing and the way we want to set ourselves us for the future.

“In that regard, I think we’ve been happy overall. We’ve had some down games, but most teams have, but we’ve been able to play young players and we’re still really young, which is probably something that we even forget internally sometimes, because this process for me has been going for three years now, so you tend to think ‘we’ll get older each year’, but we’ve actually got younger.

“Overall, we’ve been really pleased with it (the season) and I think everyone is looking forward to having a good [mid-season] break.”

Roos said that Melbourne’s 55-point loss to the Sydney Swans at the SCG– its biggest loss this season - would give the club good motivation to bounce back after the bye.

 “It’s [the season] gone pretty quick – 13 weeks. The tendency after a loss is that you get a little bit down, and you don’t like to lose going into the bye.”

“We just feel that Sydney, at the moment, is more advanced and is playing a really physical hard game. We just couldn’t match it for four quarters and that’s the level we want to get to eventually.

“Overall, we’ve been really positive and our worst footy has certainly been better than it has been over the last couple of years – and that was one of the goals going into the season.”

Roos said there were many encouraging signs on-field to give supporters confidence for the second half of the season. 

“Our percentage is now up over 100, which is a good indication of our consistency – points for and against. Six [wins] and seven [losses], you always want to win more games, because everyone is greedy, but I think everyone is really confident going into the bye weekend.

“The first 13 weeks have been really productive and we’ve ticked a lot of things off that we wanted to tick off. We’re still seeing a lot of young players playing and we’re still a really young footy team.”