Essendon midfielder David Zaharakis is confident the Bombers are ‘not that far off’ the top teams following Friday night’s loss to Geelong.

The Bombers gave up a 25-point lead mid way through the second quarter to go down by 28 points, inaccuracy in front of goals proving costly.

“We did lose the game, we are disappointed we lost and there is areas to work on,” he said.

“ We kicked one goal nine in the third quarter and if that is five goals five at three quarter time we are in front and in the game with a chance to win.”

“We need to finish off on our good work, we can’t keep getting the ball in our forward line and not kicking goals.”

Zaharakis said their were a lot of positivs to come out of the game and the belief among the group was still strong after winning six of the first seven matches of the season.

“We still have a lot of improvement, we are an up and coming side that are getting to that next level but we didn’t feel we were too far off because as I said if we kicked five goals five we were in the game,” he told ABC radio.

“We were attacking the game, running through the middle, linking up handball and hitting the short 45’s but all of a sudden we started to chip backwards and chip the ball around.”

The Cats snatched the lead through Jordan Schroeder on the siren at half time and did not trail again for the remainder of the game.

“They sort of grabbed the momentum going into half time and that is what we spoke about, we wanted to go back to attacking footy because that had got us the four goal lead.”

“We don’t really know why we started doing that at the 15 minute mark of the second quarter but we ended up turning the ball over and they played sling shot footy against us.”

“We wanted to control possession of the footy for only two or three minutes but we ended up doing it for ten to fifteen minutes and the message just wasn’t getting across.”

Zaharakis said his side had learned they needed to take the game on more and be braver as coach James Hird said in his post match press conference.

“When it becomes up and back in a shoot out any team can win on any day and like we did tonight if you kick inaccurate you are going to lose a shoot out,” Zaharakis said.

“We were pretty disappointed that the game was up and back, we want to attack quick and defend slow.”

“Towards the end of the second quarter we were attacking slowly and it cost us from there.”