Melbourne coach Craig Bellamy has appealed to NRL players to stop staying down and milking penalties for head-high contact, saying it’s a bad look and causes too many breaks in the game.

Bellamy won’t be encouraging the competition leaders to follow Newcastle’s lead after Knights’ coach Wayne Bennett said he would tell his players to lay on the ground and force the video referee to make a call.

While Bennett says the Knights have had three players taken out in two weeks and received no penalties, Bellamy is urging his former mentor to play the game on its merits and leave the referees to do their job.

“I don’t think there’s any more high hits than there has been before and the referees are doing a pretty good job on it,” Bellamy told reporters on Tuesday.

“It’s just a matter of us, or the players, trusting the officials and getting on with it.

“It (milking) is a really bad look for our game.

“Having a guy like Wayne Bennett come out and say he’s going to tell his players to lay down, well that’s not what our game’s about either.

“If Wayne thinks it’s getting that bad, we’ve got a bit of a worry.

“You can see it slowly but surely creeping into our game where people are staying down.

“The one thing good about our game compared to some other codes is it keeps flowing.

“If we’re going to get people laying down, that’s going to pull it up.

“If they start going to the video ref to see whether it was a high shot or not, that’s more breaks in play.”

Bellamy said he had raised the topic with his players a couple of years ago and they emphatically refused to lay down for minor contact.

“So I haven’t really brought it up with them again. I suppose we will revisit that if it keeps going,” he said.

“You’ve just got to come back to the players. If they get a bit of a hit up there but they’re right to play on, play on.

“If they have to think about staying down, well they’re not that badly hurt.

“When they cop one and they don’t know where they’re at, that’s when they don’t get up.”

Meanwhile, Bellamy says the Storm didn’t work hard enough and weren’t switched on in attack in the loss to Cronulla, Melbourne’s first defeat in 10 games this season.

The Storm host the Broncos on May 25, two days after game one of the State of Origin series.