Gold Coast wants to play like the Sydney Swans.

It wants to play "brutal" and "ugly".

With just three matches in charge, interim coach Dean Solomon has made no secret he wants to make the SUNS more defensive.

And following Saturday night's 33-point loss to Essendon, he rammed that message home again.

Gold Coast conceded 71 inside 50s and had just 31 itself, but somehow kept the game within 10 points at three-quarter time.

Solomon says that's just what he wanted – an arm-wrestle.

The SUNS employed an extra man – sometimes two – in defence to stifle the Bombers' ball movement, and tried to open the game up late to win, but weren't good enough.

Solomon said despite his short time in charge, he wanted to make an impact, and that meant a drastic change in gameplan, what he called a finals-type gameplan.

He said they had to play ugly.

"I'm not sure this footy club has played ugly footy over our journey," he said.

"What's grand final day? It's just brutal isn't it? It is ugly footy.

"The greatest example for us is we can continue to look at the Sydney Swans and the way they go about it.

"They play brutal footy week in, week out.

"We're looking at a similar brand and it's going to take a bit of time for our players to get their heads around it and understand what it's going to take.

"It's really hard, but we're really confident it's a finals brand of footy and that's where we need to head as a football club."

Solomon said it was a game-style based on winning the contested ball and tackling first, and ball movement second.

The SUNS battled hard for four quarters, with the ball camped in their defensive 50 much of the night, but never dropped their heads.

Captain Steven May kept Joe Daniher to one goal and was terrific marshalling the backline, while Trent McKenzie played his best game for a long time, and youngster Max Spencer again impressed.

Despite missing players through injury, including Tom Lynch, Gary Ablett, Jarrod Witts and Jarryd Lyons, Solomon said he was no longer going to talk about absentees – just those that played.

"It's about becoming consistent and being hard to play against and that's what you are if you're a finals side," he said.

With the narrow deficit at the final change, the SUNS equalised across the ground and the Bombers finally opened up to run out easy victors.

Solomon said he had no regrets in changing tact in the final term.

"We had to go for the win," he said.

"We knew we'd either lose by 30 or 40 points or win by 20.

"It was a call I made, so I put my hand up for that and take ownership of that.

"We got the arm-wrestle we wanted at three quarter-time, exactly where we wanted to be, so we went for the win, we got opened up, but we learnt a lot from that."