Star midfielder Dan Hannebery believes his side’s best football is good enough to match it with the competition’s best, it's just a matter of stringing it together for longer.

The Sydney Swans sit 15th on the ladder with a 3-7 record going into this weekend’s bye, an unprecedented position for coach John Longmire who's led the Club to finals in each of his six years in charge.

Hannebery, speaking from a Club-wide junior football club visit on Thursday, said the review into Friday night’s loss to the Hawthorn, as well as the season as a whole, was tough to swallow, but the discussion laid bare what needed to be rectified, or at least what they needed to reclaim, ahead of the Round 12 clash.

The narrow defeat to the Hawks was a sour end to what was actually a positive month for the football club, having won the previous three games successively to keep season 2017 alive.

Strong performances against Brisbane, North Melbourne and St Kilda underlined by pressure and a contested brand of football showed there was still plenty of life in the Swans’ season and Hannebery, one of the keys to the mini resurgence, was confident that same approach would help combat the fifth-ranked Bulldogs at the SCG on Thursday night.

“We reviewed the game (on Thursday) and we were clearly disappointed with our efforts,” Hannebery said.

“We need to bounce back (and) we get a good opportunity this time next week against the Dogs to get back on the winners’ list and return to the same form shown before we lost on Friday night.

“We’ve shown we’re capable, we just need to be able to do it consistently over a number of weeks.

“We’ve put ourselves in a really tough position, but I’m certainly confident in the group that we can work our way out of it.”

The Sydney Swans have a big task ahead of them to put their unfavourable start to the season behind them and turn things around, and it will take more than just a win against the reigning premiers to do that, but at this point in time Hannebery says the focus remains squarely on the next round and nothing further.

“Where we’re at, we can only think afford to think week-by-week (and) it starts with the Bulldogs,” he added.

“We’ll have three really strong training sessions going into that game, we’ll aim to rectify some of those areas we need to work on, get stuck in and give a super effort against a side who’s in red-hot form.”

Thursday night's clash will be the second meeting between the two clubs in 2017, the Dogs claiming a 23-point win at Docklands in Round 2.