Luke Ablett believes the Sydney Swans poor starts come down to the mind and that all the players will need to be in the ‘right head space’ to defeat St Kilda on Saturday night.

The Swans gave away a six-goal advantage at the first change last weekend and while not taking anything away from the Kangaroos’ courageous victory he does feel it was a possible win that got away.

“They were a lot harder at the footy and turned up to play and we didn’t so it is something that we need to rectify this week,” Ablett said.

“We can’t let teams continually get away to starts like we did on the weekend and against West Coast and a couple of other games and we have spoken about it.

“It would be good if you could just turn up and flick a switch and everything would work the way it was meant to but unfortunately it doesn’t work that easy.

“It is all mental as we had a very good preparation and trained really well last week so it is about getting all 22 blokes in the right head space to turn up and compete from the first bounce.”

Ablett made a remarkable recovery to even play in the contest given he hyper-extended his knee in the win over Melbourne two weeks ago.

He admits he thought his season was over.

“I heard a snap so I knew there was a crack in there somewhere and it didn’t feel real good,” he said of his injury in the third quarter.

“I thought the worst, that I was out for the year, but luckily it came up pretty well and there was no major damage so I could play last weekend.

“It was a little bit sore towards the end of the game but it pulled up pretty well. There was no scarring in there and it is feeling good.”

The Saints have been up and down in 2007 but in recent times they fire up to play the back to back grand finalists.

There is added spice now given their head coach is the Swans’ former midfield coach Ross Lyon and Ablett said the players take more of an interest in them given the connection.

“You can see a bit of his influence rubbing off onto them so far but they are still a really talented list and if we don’t turn up till half time we will get smashed so it is something we have to concentrate on,” he added.

"He's got a really good knowledge of how we operate and what we are going to try and do and he's going to have a lot of structures in place to counteract that but we've played the same way for four years, so I don't think you'll see any real tricks or changes from us.

“Just hopefully we'll do it for better and longer than the Saints on the weekend and hopefully get back on track.”