Cats coach Chris Scott is backing his men to return to form in Friday night's blockbuster clash with the Western Bulldogs at Simonds Stadium.

Scott's team has lost its past three matches, but wholesale changes at selection this week appear unlikely.

“My bias is towards supporting the players that have done it before,” Scott said on Fox Footy's AFL 360 program on Monday night.

“It is [a huge game against the Western Bulldogs], but we sort of say that most weeks. 

"But if you take a couple of steps back, and this isn’t to gloss over the performances of the last three weeks, but the first five weeks were pretty good.

“And if we’d said, 'For the first eight games we’re not going to play at home once and we’ll go into our first game 5-3 and fifth on the ladder,' I don’t think we’d be distraught.

“But what we can’t gloss over is what we are right at the moment ... we can’t talk even what we were four or five weeks ago.

"We need to talk about what we are now, which is not very strong defensively and a little bit confused the other way."

Geelong has come under fire for its poor tackling in the loss to Essendon on Saturday night.

However, Scott has conceded that the Cats need to improve in more than just one area.

“It wasn’t just the effort to get to the tackle, we had so many ineffective tackles,” he said.

“When you analyse the way Champion [Data] do it, if you nail someone in a tackle and they’re good enough to get it away, it doesn’t count as a tackle.

“A lot of occasions when we were in a good position to tackle and we just weren’t good enough and that’s so superficial it’s not funny. It’s obvious for everyone to see.

“Not to underestimate it’s importance, it’s crucial, but there are other parts of our game, other individual players, that have some issues with the way they’re playing at the moment.”