WHILE Hawthorn captain Sam Mitchell concedes his side's 32-point loss to the Western Bulldogs on Saturday afternoon was a "reality check" of sorts, he denies it was the loss the club needed to have in order to take a step forward.

Mitchell, 25, admitted the players will need to learn from the lacklustre performance they put in against the Bulldogs, after being smashed in both the clearance and tackle count.

"We have to look at that game and some of the things we could do a lot better, because if we play like that, we're going to lose a lot more games than we're going to win," he said.

"We'll have a good look at the tape and make sure we can improve on those things."

However, Mitchell also said the Hawks did not "need" to be exposed in that way on Saturday in order to assemble an assault on the second half of the season, as the club refuses to look beyond one week either way at any one time.

"People use the phrase 'reality check', and people say during the week that you've got to have a loss at some stage, and they always use the 'one week at time' cliché," he said.

"But probably it's the same thing in the past. We don't look [back] more than a week ago as well.

"We might have won nine in a row before now, but we weren't worried about any of them.

"All we thought about was Melbourne last week, and we didn't play that well then, and then again today we didn't play anywhere near the way we want to move the footy.

"We weren't able to do that today, so we'll look at the Bulldogs game and the Essendon game [this week] – any of the other things that happen you sort of forget about.

"I'm not one that says you need to have a loss, because probably you've only had one win or one loss at any given time."

With every side in the competition having now suffered at least one loss, Mitchell said the season is shaping up to be an unpredictable one dominated by upset results.

"Some of the games that have happened this year have been very hard for tipping," he said.

"I'm not sure what the scores are like for this year, but it just seems to be that with any game, there's a good possibility of there being an upset.

"We've got Essendon next week, and they took Adelaide, which has probably been one of the best sides in the competition for the last four or five years, to five points."

Ultimately, Mitchell said it was hard to accept his side was beaten at it's "own game" on Saturday, as the Hawks have previously prided themselves on being hard at the man and the ball.

"We just couldn't get our game going. They were much better than us inside, they won more of the footy, they out-tackled us," he said.

"It's going to happen at times, but I think what's happened for us this year is that when we've been beaten for small parts of games, we've been able to bounce back and get the ascendancy at some point.

"Today, they were just very consistent. They didn't have a down patch where we were able to get on top of them."