ST KILDA coach Alan Richardson has blamed his side's wastefulness inside its forward 50 for its 25-point loss to GWS at Spotless Stadium.

Richardson saw his team blow some important early dominance and was left scratching his head after the Saints were by far the better team in the first half, but still somehow found themselves trailing by four points at the main break.

"We let ourselves down with our inability to be able to finish our work," he said after the game. "One team was much better at capitalising in that part of the game."

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Richardson said he was impressed with his team's attitude and intensity and but knows that he has a job to do to try and translate such forward dominance into points.

"It wasn't just that we didn't kick straight - we had 40 entries to 17 at half-time, you don't get a more dominant performance in terms of creating opportunity for yourself," he said.

"They're a pretty good footy team so there was a lot to like with respect to creating opportunities and denying the opposition opportunities.

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"But you're not going to win games of footy against good teams when you don't maximise when you're on top and we didn't do that.

"We were inaccurate, but it was a bit more than that, we needed to get even more shots on goal in that period."

Giants coach Leon Cameron agreed, hinting he thought his team had been let off in the opening stanzas of Saturday's twilight match. 

WATCH Alan Richardson's full post-match media conference

"We should have been down by four or five goals but that's footy," Cameron said. "We came in at half-time and addressed a few things and a number of players lifted, and that was great."

With both sides having 21 scoring shots apiece, Richardson knows it was St Kilda's poor goal conversion that let them down yet again.

With just 4.7 via set shots compared to the Giants' accurate 9.0, he said it is the specifics that he'll be looking to work on ahead of their match against the Bulldogs next week.

"There's still obviously a lot to work on but it's really specific in terms of what we need to work on," he said.

"We just need to get bang for our buck and that's been a bit of a challenge for us all year so that's still a work in progress."