During the week, Malthouse described the clash with the unbeaten Hawks as an excellent opportunity for his players to gauge where they were at and, although they generally failed that test, the match served to highlight some areas of concern to the coach.
"There’s a lot of work to be done and we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t acknowledge the fact that we’ve got some weaknesses across the board and this is the challenge now," Malthouse said after the 65-point loss.
"I’m not despondent over this game because I think there’s so many things that we can look at and think ‘well, we know we can get better’.
"I’d hate to come away from a game like that and think ‘gee, where do we start?’ or ‘we’ve got nothing to work on’. We’ve got plenty to work on.
"We were beaten in a lot of aspects of the game. If you get beaten like that and you’ve got nothing to say about the loss then you’ve got nowhere to go."
Hawthorn led at every change before heightening the win with a blistering final term, and Malthouse was blunt in his assessment of his side's performances across every line in the heavy defeat.
"We were smashed in the centre and you need only to look at the last quarter when they kicked 10 goals and nine of them came from forwards, so our backs just weren’t up to scratch on the day; a few of them are really patchy at the moment," he said.
"Shane Wakelin has been pretty good for us, but I thought he made some fundamental errors for a bloke who’s nearing 250 games. I thought Nathan Brown did pretty well until such time as they controlled the ball, then he lowered his colours badly in the last half.
"I think it would be fair to say Tyson Goldsack and Harry O’Brien … those two blokes haven’t really been in good form this year. Goldsack’s still coming back from hurting his knee and just hasn’t had the hard work, so he’ll get better, but at his own admission he was poor today and I thought Harry O’Brien was quite poor. There’s four defenders that have stood up reasonably well, but not today.
"At the forward end, really our work ethic down there was sub-standard compared to the past. If you get beaten like that, we’ve got to acknowledge the opponent of course, they were fantastic and they deserved their win, but also that it gives us some things to work on."
But, thankfully for the players that took the field on Saturday, Malthouse doesn’t appear intent on sharpening the axe ahead of the next match against St Kilda.
"The realism is that you can’t necessarily change the side dramatically and I have no intention of doing that off the cuff right now," he said.
"I think we’ll reassess the lines … and where players play and how they work together.
"I think our midfield has been pretty good but … when you go head to head and you come away getting beaten, perhaps our personnel in there either wasn’t good enough on the day or isn’t good enough period so we’ll weigh that up.
"One thing is certain; we’re not in a position where we’ll ever contemplate giving up. We will go for it and experiment and we’ll keep working at it."
Brown stood Lance Franklin for the whole match and conceded six goals, but Malthouse forecasts many more re-acquaintances.
"It would have been easy to give him another opponent, but sometimes it’s far better to take your medicine and learn from it," he said.
"He’s a kid who came to me at three-quarter time and at the end of the game and was still wanting to know how he could do things better. That’s fantastic because he will be one of those players down the track will represent us in a capacity where he will be the dominant backline player for us."
