The Carlton brains trust may well know as much about this week's opponents Melbourne than their Demons counterparts.

Carlton coach Brett Ratten and his assistant Mark Riley have both been assistants at Melbourne and are set to fully exploit their knowledge of the team.

And Riley led the team for half of last season as caretaker senior coach, following the departure of Neale Daniher.

Carlton last week snapped its record-equalling run of losses with a 23-point win over Collingwood but Ratten said he was conscious of the Demons' potential.

He said Melbourne prime movers such as Russell Robertson, Aaron Davey, Brad Green and Cameron Bruce could hit peak form at any time and threaten a complacent opposition.

"When they're up and going they're going to be very dangerous, Melbourne, and we know their capabilities," Ratten said.

"I've been there myself and knowing the players as an assistant, and then we've got Bomber Riley who says they've got some dangerous blokes who are playing maybe not just to their peak performance but are not far away.

"We know we've got a big job in hand against Melbourne who are in the same situation that we were last week.

"They'll come out swinging and we need to make sure that we bring that game that we played against Collingwood to the table."

Ratten said the key to the Blues' debut win this season was a new proactive approach which the players need to maintain - or face the axe.

"We had a focus to be more aggressive and to be more physical and think we did that and players got a lot of confidence out of that going forward.

"If we bring that we're going to be a hard team to beat," Ratten said.

"We'll probably reinforce it at training - that if players maybe didn't achieve these standards they might not be in the team.

"That's the path we took, that we need to play like this to be a respected AFL team.

"That's the standard that we set and that's the standard we are going to stick by."

He agreed the Blues' main challenge was to not revert to its failure in the first three games to stop rivals dictating the tempo of matches.

"That's the challenge for us, to win two games in a row - and not even that, it's to bring that game that we brought last week with that physicality," he said.

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