St Kilda coach Ross Lyon believes the Saints are a much more attacking team now than during the early stages of his reign as he hit back at critics who suggest his team is playing boring, defensive football.
The Saints, winners of the pre-season competition and one of the favourites for this year's premiership, find themselves sitting outside the top eight after six rounds with just three wins with the pressure increasing on the club following last week's loss to Port Adelaide when the team kicked just nine goals.
To the Saints and Lyon's many critics, it was more proof the team has gone backwards since the departure of the free-flowing attacking game style under previous coach Grant Thomas.
In 2004, their best year under Thomas when they lost the preliminary final by just one goal to eventual premiers Port Adelaide, the Saints averaged 111 points per game but last year under Lyon it was just 85 points per game while it has only risen slightly to 90 points so far this season.
This has led many to suggest that Lyon - a former assistant coach at Sydney - has imposed the Swans' low-scoring brand of football on a formerly high-scoring team to its detriment.
But Lyon said on Tuesday that it was misleading and the Saints should be judged only from the second half of last season after initially struggling to come to terms with their change in coach and game plan.
"It (the comparisons between St Kilda and Sydney) gets thrown up a lot and it is a fair comparison for rounds one to 11 last year, that is undeniable," Lyon said.
"But then once I understood the (playing) group and we spoke and had an open and frank discussion - from then on last season we averaged 14 goals a week."
"In our last 17 games (the second half of last year and the six games played so far this season) we have kicked under 12 goals on only three occasions."
In contrast in the first half of last season the Saints scored less than 12 goals in six of their 11 matches and won just four of them.
But since then the club has won 10 and drawn one of 17 matches and kicked over 100 points on six occasions after doing so just twice in the first 11 rounds last season.
Lyon said those statistics did not reflect the near hysteria surrounding the Saints' supposedly poor performances.
"To me it's a significant shift in how we play and how we use the ball," Lyon said of the Saints' improved figures since round 12 last year.
"I think (our performances) have been misunderstood."
Lyon described the Saints' start to the season as "reasonable" but defied anyone to tell him the club's season was over.
And he said the Saints' record so far - which leaves them just one game adrift of the top four - is not bad when compared to the records of some of the other top contenders of recent years.
"You have got a top four team from last year in Collingwood, who we all admire, who are also 3-3 and (last year's runners-up) Port Adelaide are 2-4 and (2006 premiers) West Coast are 1-5," he said.
"And then you look at teams like Essendon who are now saying they need to get a bit more defence into their game while as an outsider I would say Carlton has turned it around recently because they have got a better balance between attack and defence."
"So everyone is trying to strike that balance (between attack and defence) and at the minute three clubs (the unbeaten trio of Geelong, Hawthorn and the Bulldogs) have struck that balance well but the rest of us are up and down in trying to strike that right balance."